be of interest. But we think more of the party over the way, and the wedding round the corner. Is it not true, oh sisters?

A fatal error.

The more we stay at home, the less desire we have to go out and about, to freshen our thoughts, enlarge the borders of our experiences, and widen our sympathies. It is fatal. We sink deeper daily in the slough of dire despond. But it should be struggled against. There are lives in which the duly recurrent meal- times are absolutely the chief events. Think of it! Is such a life ignoble? At least, it contains no element of the noble, the high, the exalted.

“My sheathed emotions in me rust,
And lie disused in endless dust.”

So sings a poet of the day, and he expresses for us what we must all feel in moments of partial emancipation from the corroding dulness that threatens to make us all body, with no animating spirit.

To associate freely with our fellow creatures may not be a complete panacea for this dreaded ill, but it at least will take us out of our narrow selves to some degree.

“A body’s sel’s the sairest weicht,” when it is unillumined by a bright spirit. And every spirit would be bright with use if we but gave it a fair chance.

“Thou didst create me swift and bright,
Of hearing exquisite, and sight.
Look on Thy creature muffled, furled,
That sees no glory in Thy world.”

Provincialism.

Perhaps we are too comfortable in our apathy and ignorance, in our cosy homes and pretty rooms, by our bright fires, and surrounded by the endless trivialities of life, to look beyond. We are “provincial” in our thoughts, circumscribed, cabined, cribbed, confined, for want of being thrust forth to achieve our own seed time and harvest, that inner garnering with the real labour of which no stranger intermeddleth, save to encourage from without, or the deeper to enslave the mind in deadly dulness.

“Comfortable couples.”

There are “comfortable couples” who live together for half their lives, and in mutual sympathy help to deaden in each other every wish for higher things. An unhappy marriage is better than this accord in common things, this levelling down of the spirit to the commonplaces of existence.

Novel-reading.

Novel-reading is a considerable factor in flattening and deadening the mind. Fiction, to those who do not misuse it, is the most delightful recreation, an escape from the material to the airy realms of fantasy. But there are girls and women who spend hours of every day in reading novels. “Three a week,” one girl confessed to not long since. The mind soon gets clogged with overmuch fiction for food. It should never be allowed to supersede general reading. In this case it is idleness, nothing more, and tends to the encouragement of that mental indolence which soon enslaves the soul.

Remedies worse than the disease.

The penalty of cowardice.

Possibilities.

Women who have the command of money, and who might turn it to such noble uses in a world of suffering and sadness, spend enormous sums in playing games of chance or backing horses to win. When they