La Platte? Why should every dweller upon earth become cosmopolitan? There is nothing novel to find anywhere. Travel is but a surging about the globe in a great restless tide of people and things as precisely similar as so many drops of water.

The problem is double in all things, — what is there satisfactorily to do, and what may we blessedly leave off doing?

"But, don't you see, there is a certain necessity upon everybody to keep doing, if ever anybody is to be able sometimes to do? There must be ways and channels open. What would become of them if only the few demanded them?"

They would be less complicated, less branched out, less speculated in, I grant. People would not scatter so much; they would not have to go so far so often. There would be fewer "abandoned farms;" fewer dead towns; fewer played-out commercial cities. There would be more self-supplying centres; less struggle, more satisfying; more thoroughness in the use and knowledge of the things about us.

No fear for intercourse and exchanges. The

world is filling up. Spread and increase

would go on; we should be kept in touch, each with our next, all along and around. The passing from neighborhood to neighborhood upon fair and rational occasion would be charming as strolls in Arcadia. Great lines of communication would link us, for trade, for distant, heavy supplies, even for speech; there might not be so many tangling routes, so many passenger trains; there would be fewer crushed and mangled passengers.

After all, ne vous dérangez pas; I do not expect to get the genie back into the bottle! I would only be glad to persuade him to accommodate his dimensions a little more comfortably to the limits of the human.

And here is where I would try to change, or renew, the motive of women's work, if not all at once the form of the work itself.

Make for this with all your power; the reestablishing of sweet, strong, home centralities. Get back as soon and completely as you can, into your dear fireside places. Women surely can do something toward restoring a more settled life for all, if they will purpose this as earnestly and entirely as they have

been purposing, or at least acquiescing in, and adapting themselves to, the unsettling.

And the restoring must be that of homeadministration; it must be at the heart of things; no outside agitation will bring it about. It must be that of simpler aims, more quiet, faithful, personal doing, a wiser, larger, yet more internal, plan and economy of the family.

It is no small, mean, contracted work. You can put all your nobler, expanded strength into it. Simplicity is not littleness, nor ignorance,—it is a grand wisdom; quietness is not shallowness, nor stagnation,—it is depth and plentifulness of life.

"Housekeepin'," says Emery Ann, "ain't just delvin' and drudgin'; it's way up out of that. No more it ain't just startin' up a little world, and leavin' it to run mostly by itself. It's a continual, capable, overrulin' Providence."

Home rule, if anything, must save the nation.

"Puss, puss!" run for the chimney-corner! And leave something outside for men to do, that there may still be chimney-corners.

the

X

ABOUT MARRIAGE

I OVERHEARD a talk the other day, upon very matter I had in mind to write to you

about.

"I am to be married on the twenty-eighth," said a young girl friend to Patience Strong.

"No," returned Miss Patience gently, "you are only to begin to be married on the twentyeighth. To be really altogether married will take all your life."

The little bride laughed happily. "Wish me well on, then, to my golden wedding," she said.

"Your golden wedding," said Rose Halliday, who had been Rose Noble long ago, and whose marriage death had sealed, not sundered, "Your golden wedding will not come to you in this life unless you to live to be a widow." She spoke the word "widow"

with a tender, exalted joy, as if it meant something even more beautiful than "wife."

The young girl sat silent for a moment, then she said: "You say that like a promise." "It is a promise," Rose Halliday answered. "Tell me more about it."

"No, I cannot tell you more about it now. It is not the time."

It was not time, perhaps; and yet that word of hers held the whole truth about marriage, of which I was to try to tell you something.

It is not the event of a moment. It is not the culmination of a woman's life, of which all the rest is to be but a continuance. Nothing culminates; everything is a beginning; this is a world of beginnings; the world of fulfillment is beyond. They who, like Rose Halliday have come, through what seemed a shadow and a day-dying, into their golden time, have partly entered in, and can speak to us from beyond. I hardly think we can do better than to listen a little longer, and hear what Rose Halliday and Patience Strong and Daisy Hope, who is going to marry Ralph Hastings, went on to say.