•l

ii. '4H

•fk- '^i-

ite ■*

! i-r. _ . s '

yC-NRLF

r.Vy.VJ'c'.^v.-Vj

iji

jJ^^JJ*?:^;-

mnis.^wn.

VAcKiwnv^ e< im .'>'/>;•' ,-9 '.V 1^

i"^ •, ■■/;».', . -^ ■ o VtWaWfAOT*

LITTLE FOXES.

LONDON: rBIMEO Br WILUAJl CLO\VES AND S0^■?, STAIIFOUD STREET
AND CHAJtl^G CKOSS.

LITTLE FOXES;

THE INSIGNIFICANT LITTLE HABITS WHICH
MAR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS.

MRS. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

[AUTHOR'S EDITION, REVISED.}

LONDON :

BELL AND DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET, AND

SAMPSON LOW, SON, AND MARSTON,

MlLrON HOUSE, LUDGATE STREET.
1866.

\ 8tfc>

PiKEFATOKY NOTICE.

From a desire to respect tlie moral right of every
Author to reap the fruits of his or her pen, the Pub-
lishers have made arrangements to share the profits of
this reprint of " Little Foxes " with the Writer.

750

CONTENTS.

Inteoduction

1. — Fault-finding ..

2. — Ireitability

3.— Eepeession

4.— Self-will

5. — Intoleeance

118

6. — DiSCOUETEOUSNEPS

144

7. — EXACTINGNESS ..

164

LITTLE FOXES.

INTEODUCTION.

"T)APA, what are you going to give iis this winter

JL for our evening readings ?" said Jennie.

" I am thinking, for one thing," I replied, " of preach-
ing a course of household sermons from a very odd text
prefixed to a discourse which I found at the bottom of
the pamphlet-barrel in the garret."

" Don't say sermon, papa, — it has such a dreadful
sound; and on winter evenings one wants something
entertaining."

" Well, treatise, then," said I, " or discourse, or essay,
or prelection; I'm not particular as to words."

" But what is the queer text that you found at the
bottom of the pamphlet-barrel?"

" It was one preached upon by jonv mother's great-
great-grandfather, the very savory and much-respected
Simeon Shuttleworth, ' on the occasion of the melancholy
defections and divisions among the godly in the town
of West Dofield ;' and it rims thus, — ' Take us the foxes,

10 LITTLE FOXES. '

the Utile foxes, that spoil the vines : for our vines have tender
grapes.' "

" It's a curious text enougb. ; but I can't imagine
what 3'ou are going to make of it."

" Simply an essay on Little Foxes," said I ; "by
which I mean those imsuspected, unwatched, insigni-
ficant little causes that nibble away domestic happiness,
and make home less than so noble an institution should
be. You may build beautiful, convenient, attractive
houses, — you may hang the walls with lovely pictures
and stud them with gems of Art; and there may be
living there together persons bound by blood and af-
fection in one common interest, leading a life common
to themselves and apart from others ; and these persons
may each one of them be possessed of good and noble
traits; there may be a common basis of affection, of
generosity, of good principle, of religion ; and yet,
through the influence of some of these perverse, nib-
bling, insignificant little foxes, half the clusters of hap-
piness on these so promising vines may fail to come
to maturity. A little community of people, all of
whom would be willing to die for each other, may not
be able to live happil}' together; that is, they may
have far less happiness than their circumstances, their
fine and excellent traits, entitle them to expect.

The reason for this in general is that home is a place
not only of strong afiections, but of entire unreserve ;
it is life's undress rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-
room, from which we go forth to more careful and
guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of

INTEODUCTION. 11

cast-off and every-day clothing. Hence has arisen the
common proverb, ' No man is a hero to his valet-de-
chambre; and the"" common warning, ' If you wish to
keep your friend, don't go and live with him.' "

" Which is only another way of saying," said my
wife, " that we are all human and imperfect ; and the
nearer you get to]|.any human being, the more defects
you see. The characters that can stand the test of daily
intimacy are about as numerous as four-leaved clovers
in a meadow ; in general, those who do not annoy you
with positive faults bore 3'ou with their insipidity.
The evenness and beauty of a strong, well-defined
nature, perfectly governed and balanced, is about the
last thing one is likely to meet with in one's researches
into life."

" But what I have to say," replied I, " is this, — that,
family-life being a state of unreserve, a state in which
there are few of those barriers and veils that keep people
in the world from seeing each other's defects and
mutually jarring and grating upon each other, it is
remarkable that it is entered^ upon and maintained
generally with less reflection, less care and forethought,
than pertain to most kinds of business which men and
women set their hands to. A man does not undertake
to run an engine or manage a piece of machinery without
some careful examination of its parts and capabilities,
and some inquiry whether he have the necessary know-
ledge, skill, and strength to make it do itself and him
justice. A man does not try to play on the violin
without seeing whether his fingers are long and flexible

12 LITTLE FOXES.

enough to bring out the harmonies and raise his per-
formance above the grade of dismal scraping to that
of divine music. What should we think of a man
who should set a whole orchestra of instruments upon
pla3-ing together without the least provision or fore-
thought as to their chording, and then howl and tear
his hair at the result ? It is not the fault of the instru-
ments that they grate harsh thunders together ; they
may each be noble and of celestial temper ; but united
without regard to their nature, dire confusion is the
result. Still worse were it, if a man were supposed
so stupid as to expect of each instrument a role opposed
to its nature, — if he asked of the octave-flute a bass
solo, and condemned the trombone because it could not
do the work of the manj^-voiced violin.

" Yet" just so carelessly is the work of forming a
family often performed. A man and woman come
together from some affinity, some partial accord of their
nature which has inspired mutual affection. There is
generally very little careful consideration of who and
what they are, — no thought of the reciprocal influence
of mutual traits, — no previous chording and testing of
the instruments which are to make lifelong harmony or
discord, — and after a short period of engagement, in
which all their mutual relations are made as opposite
as possible to those which must follow marriage, these
two furnish their house and begin life together. Ten
to one, the domestic roof is supposed at once the proper
refuge for relations and friends on both sides, who also
are introduced into the interior concert without any

INTRODUCTION. 13

special consideration of wliat is likely to be the opera-
tion of character on character, the play of instrument
with instrument ; then follow children, each of whom
is a separate entity, a separate will, a separate force in
the family ; and thus, with the lesser forces of servants
and dependents, a family is made up. And there is no
wonder if all these cbance-assorted instruments, playing
together, sometimes make quite as much discord as
harmony. For if the husband and wife chord, the
wife's sister or husband's mother may introduce a
discord ; and then again, each child of marked cha-
racter introduces another possibility of confusion. The
conservative forces of human nature are so strong and
so various, that, with all these drawbacks, the family
state is after all the best and purest happiness that
earth affords. But then, with cultivation and care, it
might be a great deal happier. Very fair pears have
been raised by dropping a seed into a good soil and
letting it alone for years ; but finer and choicer are
raised by the watchings, tendings, prunings of the
gardener. Wild grape-vines bore very fine grapes, and
an abundance of them, before our friend Dr. Grant
took up his abode at lona, and, studying the laws of
Nature, conjured up new species of rarer fruit and
flavour out of the old. And so, if all the little foxes
that infest our domestic vine and fig-tree were once
hunted out and killed, we might have fairer clusters
and fruit all winter."

" But, papa," said Jennie, " to come to the foxes ; let's
know what they are."

14 LITTLE FOXES.

" Well, as the text says, they are little foxes, the pet foxes
of good people, unsuspected little animals, — on the whole,
often thought to be really creditable little beasts, that
may do good, and at all events cannot do much harm.
And as I have taken to the Puritanic order in my
discourse, I shall set them in scA^'ens, as Noah did his
clean beasts in the ark. Now my seven little foxes are
these : —

1. Fault-finding.

2. Irritability.

3. Kepressiox.

4. Self-will.

5. Intolerance.

C. Discourteousness.
7. Exactingness.

" And here," turning to my sermon, "is what I have
to say about the first of them."

FAULT-FINDING.

A MOST respectable little animal, that many people
let run freely among their domestic vines, under
the notion that he helps the growth of the grapes,
and is the principal means of keeping them in order.

Now it may safely be set down as a maxim, that
nobody likes to be found fault with, but everybody likes
to find fault when things do not suit him.

Let my courteous reader ask him or herself if he or
she does not experience a relief and pleasure in finding
fault with or about whatever troubles them.

This appears at first sight an anomaly in the provi-
sions of Nature. Generally we are so constituted, that
what it is a pleasure to us to do, it is a pleasure to our
neighbour to have us do. It is a pleasure to give, and
a pleasure to receive. It is a pleasure to love, and a
pleasure to be loved ; a pleasure to admire, a pleasure to
be admired. It is a pleasure also to find fault, but not a
pleasure to be found fault with. Furthermore, those
people whose sensitiveness of temperament leads them
to find the most fault, are precisely those who can least
bear to be found fault with ; they bind heavy burdens
and grievous to be borne, and Ja}^ them on other men's
shoulders, but they themselves cannot bear the weight
of a finger.

16 LITTLE FOXES.

Now the difficulty in tlic case is this : There are
things in life that need to be altered ; and that things
may be altered, they must be spoken of to the people
whose business it is to make the change, lliis oj^ens
wide the door of fault-finding to well-disposed people,
and gives them latitude of conscience to impose on
their fellows all the annoyances which they themselves
feel. The father and mother of a family are ftiult-
finders, ex officio ; and to them flows back the tide of
every separate individual's complaints in the domestic
circle, till often the whole air of the house is chilled and
darkened by a drizzling Scotch mist of querulousness.
Very bad are these mists for grape-vines, and produce
mildew in many a fair cluster.

Enthusius falls in love with Hermione, because she
looks like a moonbeam, — because she is ethereal as a
summer cloud, spirituelle. He commences forthwith the
perpetual adoration system that precedes marriage. He
assures her that she is too good for this world, too
delicate and fair for any of the uses of poor mortality, —
that she ought to tread on roses, sleep on the c]ouds, —
that she ought never to shed a tear, know a fatigue,
or make an exertion, but live apart in some
bright, ethereal sphere worthy of her charms. All
which is duly chanted in her ear in moonlight walks
or sails, and so often repeated that a sensible girl
may be excused for believing that a little of it may
be true.

Kow comes marriage, — and it turns out that Enthu-
sius is very particular as to his cofiee, that he is ex-

FAULT-FINDING. 17

cessively disturbed if his meals are at all irregular,
and that he cannot be comfortable with any table
arrangements which do not resemble those of his notable
mother, lately deceased in the odour of sanctity ; he also
wants his house in perfect order at all hours. Still he
does not propose to provide a trained housekeeper ; it is
all to be effected by means of certain raw Irish girls,
under the superintendence of this angel who was to
tread on roses, sleep on clouds, and never know an
earthly care. Neither has Enthusius ever considered it
a part of a husband's duty to bear personal incon-
veniences in silence. He would freely shed his blood
for Hermione, — nay, has often frantically proposed the
same in the hours of courtship, when of course nobody
wanted it done, and it could answer no manner of use ;
and thus to the idyllic dialogues of that period succeed
such as these : —

" My dear, this tea is smoked : can't you get Jane into
the way of making it better ?"

" My dear, -I have tried ; but she will not do as I tell
her."

*' Well, all I know is, other people can have good
tea, and I should think we might."

And again at dinner : —

"My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is
always overdone."

*' Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday
you said it was just right."

" Well, almost alwaj's."

" W^ell, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had com-

18 LITTLE FOXES.

pany in the parlour, and could not go out to caution
Bridget, as I generally do. It's very difficult to get
things done with such a girl."

"My mother's things were always well done, no
matter what her girl was."

Again : " My dear, you must speak to the servants
about wasting the coal. I never saw such a con-
sumption of fuel in a family of our size ;" or, " My dear,
how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper ?" or,
" ]My dear, I shall actually have to give up coming to
dinner if my dinners cannot be regular ;" or, " My
dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are
ironed, — it is perfectly scandalous ;" or, " My dear, you
must not let Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlour ;"
or, " My dear, you must stop the children from playing
in the garret ;" or, " My dear, you must see that
Maggie doesn't leave the mat out on the railing when
she sweeps the front hall ;" and so on, up-stairs and
down-stairs, in the lady's chamber, in attic, garret, and
cellar, "my dear" is to see that nothing goes wrong,
and she is found fault with when anything does.

Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his some-
time angel in tears, and she tells him he does not love
her as he once did, repudiates the charge with all his
heart, and declares he loves her more than ever, — and
perhaps he does. The only thing is that she has passed
out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of
actualities. AVhile she was considered an angel, a star,
a bird, an evening cloud, of course there was nothing to
be found fault with in her ; but now that the angel has

FAULT-FINDING. 1^

become chief business-partner in an earthly working
firm, relations are different. Enthusius could say the
same things over again under the same circumstances,
but unfortunately now they never are in the same
circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in
the habit of speaking from impulse, and saying a thing
merely and only because he feels it. Before marriage
he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being
dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his
very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy
the life to which he was to introduce her after mar-
riage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to
present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to
criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty
and love of elegance, which made him admire her before
marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the
domestic menage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred
defects and find a hundred annoyances.

Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife,
who is only grieved, not provoked, — who has no sense
of injustice, and meekly strives to make good the hard
conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women
have we seen, looking for all the world like plants that
have been nursed and forced into bloom in the steam-
heat of the conservatory, and are now sickly and
yellow, dropping leaf hy leaf, in the dry, dusty parlour.

But there is another side of the picture, — where the
wife, provoked and indignant, takes up the fault-finding
trade in return, and with the keen arrows of her
woman's wit, searches and penetrates every joint of the

20 LITTLE FOXES.

husband's armour, showing herself full as unjust and far
more culpable in this sort of conflict.

kSadelest of all sad things is it to see two once very
dear friends employing all that peculiar knowledge of
each other which love had given them only to harass
and provoke, — thrusting and piercing with a certainty
of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection
could have put in their power, wounding their own
hearts with every deadly thrust they made at one
another, and all for such inexpressibly miserable trifles
as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.

For the contentions that loosen the very foundations
of love, that crumble away all its fine traceries and
carved work, about what miserable worthless things do
they commonly begin ! — a dinner underdone, too much
oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap,
a dish broken! — and for this miserable sort of trash,
very good, very generous, very religious people will
sometimes waste and throw away b}'^ double-handfuls
the very thing for which houses are built, and coal
burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,
— their happiness. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt
meat, better any inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of
love ; and nothing so surely burns away love as constant
fault-finding.

For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two
near and dear friends comes in time to establish a
chronic soreness, so that the mildest, the most reasonable
suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof, occasions
burning irritation ; and when this morbid state has

FAULT-FINDING. ^I

once set in, the restoration of love seems well nigh
impossible.

For example : Enthusins having got np this morning
in the best of humours, in the most playful tones begs
Hermione not to make the tails of her ^'s quite so long ;
and Hermione fires up with —

"And, pra}^, what else wouldn't j^ou wish me to do?
Perhaps you would be so good, when you have leisure,
as to make out an alphabetical list of the things in me
that need correcting."

" My dear, jon are unreasonable."

" I don't think so. I should like to get to the end of
the requirements of my lord and master sometimes."

" Now, my dear, you really are very silly."

"Please say something original, my dear. I have
heard that till it has lost the charm of novelty."

" Come now, Hermione, don't let's quarrel."

"My dear sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I;
I'm sure I was only asking to be directed. I trust some
time, if I live to be ninety, to suit j-our fastidious taste.
I trust the coffee is right this morning, and the tea, and
the toast, and the steak, and the servants, and the front-
hall mat, and the upper-story hall door, and the base-
ment premises ; and now I suppose I am to be trained
in respect to my general education. I shall set about
tbe tails of my ^'s at once, but trust you will prepare
a list of any other little things that need emendation."

Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the
table.

" If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear.

22 LITTLE FOXES.

I should observe that it is not good manners to dnim on
the table," said his fair opposite.

I..

" Hermione, you are enougli to drive a man frantic !"
exclaims Enthusius, rushing out with bitterness in his
soul, and a determination to take his dinner at Del-
monico's.

Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks
there never was such a sprite of a w^oman, — the most
utterly unreasonable, provoking human being he ever
met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his
own inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made
every nerve so sensitive and sore, that the mildest
suggestion of advice or reproof on the most indifferent
subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been the
guilty partner in this morning's encounter ; he has said
only what is fair and proper, and she has been un-
reasonable and cross ; but, after all, the fault is re-
motely his.

When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his
Hermione in A^ery deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but
no housekeeper, why did he not face the matter like an
honest man ? \\ hy did he not remember all the fine
things about dependence and uselessness with which he
had been filling her head for a 3'ear or two, and in
common honesty exact no more from her than he had
bargained for? Can a bird make a good business
manager ? Can a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and
impait to their uncircumcised ears the high crafts and
mysteries of elegant housekeeping ?

If his little wife has to learn her domestic role of

FAULT-FINDING. 23

liouseliold duty, as most girls do, by a thousand mortifi-
cations, a thousand perplexities, a thousand failures, let
him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to her as
possible. Let him remember with what admiring
smiles, before marriage, he received her pretty profes-
sions of utter heljDlessness and incapacity in domestic
matters, finding only poetry and grace in what, after
marriage, proved an anno^^ance.

And if a man finds that he has a wife ill-adapted to
wifely duties, does it follow that the best thing he can
do is to blurt out, without form or ceremony, all the
criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in
the many details of household life ? He would not dare
to speak with as little preface, apology, or circumlo-
cution, to his business manager, to his butcher, or his
baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never
criticised the table at his boarding-house without some
reflection, and studying to take unto himself acceptable
words whereby to soften the asperity of the criticism.
The laws of society require that a man should qualify,
soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he
meets in the outer world, or they will turn again and
rend him. But to his own wife, in his own house and
home, he can find fault without ceremony or softening.
So he can ; and he can awake, in the course of a year or
two, to find his wife a changed w^oman, and his home
unendurable. He may find, too, that unceremonious
fault-finding is a game that two can play at, and that a
woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and
skill than a man.

24 LITTLE FOXES.

But the fonlt lies not alwaj's on the side of the
hiTsband. Quite as often is a devoted, patient, good-
tempered man harassed and hunted and baited by the
inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal
talent seems to lie in the ability at first glance to
discover and make manifest the weak point in every-
thing.

AVe have seen the most generous, the most warm-
hearted and obliging of mortals, under this sort of
training, made the most morose and disobliging of
husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they
do, they have at last ceased doing. The disappoint-
ment of not pleasing they have abated by not trying
to please.

We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty,
whose murmurs, exactions, and caprices were infinite.
He had at last, as a refuge to his wearied nerves, settled
down into a habit of utter disregard and neglect; he
treated her wishes and her complaints with equal
indifference, and went on with his life as nearl}^ as
possible as if she did not exist. He silently provided
for her what he thought pro])er, without troubling
himself to notice her requests or listen to her grievances.
Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold
and gone : there was no sympathy left to warm her.
Death came, and he breathed freely as a man released.
He married again, — a woman with no beauty, but much
love and goodness, — a woman who asked little, blamed
seldom, and tlien with all the tact and address which
the utmost thoughtfulness could devise ; and the passive,

FAULT-FINDING. 25

negligent husband became the attentive, devoted slave
of her will. He was in her hands as clay in the hands
of the potter ; the least breath or suggestion of criticism
from her lips, who criticised so little and so thought
fully, weighed more with him than many outspoken
words. So different is the same human being, according
to the touch of the hand which plays upon him !

I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between
husband and wife : its consequences are even worse as
respects children. The habit once sufiered to grow up
between the two that constitute the head of the family
descends and runs through all the branches. Children
are more hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-
finding than by any other one thing. Often a child
has all the sensitiveness and all the susceptibility of a
grown person, added to the faults of childhood. No-
thing about him is right as yet ; he is immature and
faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect
liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below,
and around, till he takes refuge either in callous hard-
ness or irritable moroseness.

A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to
tell his mother something he has on his heart, and
Number One cries out, —

" Oh, you've left the door open ! I do wish you
wouldn't always leave the door open ! And do look at
the mud on your shoes ! How many times must I tell
you to wipe your feet ?"

" Now there you've thrown 3'our cap on the sofa
again ! AYhen will you learn to hang it up '?"

26 LITTLE FOXES.

** Don't put your slate there; that isn't the place
for it."

"How dirty your hands are! what have you been
doing ?"

" Don't sit in that chair ; you break the springs,
jouncing."

" Mercy ! how your hair looks ! Do go up-stairs and
comb it."

*' There, if you haven't torn the braid all off your
coat ! Dear me, what a bo}' !"

" Don't speak so loud ; your voice goes through my
head."

" I want to know, Jim, if it was j^ou that broke up
that barrel that I have been saving for brown flour."

*' I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of
my razor."

*' Jim's been writing at my desk, and blotted three
sheets of the best paper."

Now the question is, if any of the grown people of
the family had to run the gauntlet of a string of criti-
cisms on themselves equally true as those that salute
unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it
than he is ?

No ; but they are grown-up people ; they have rights
that others are bound to respect. Everybody cannot
tell them exactly what he thinks about everything they
do. If ever}" one could and did, would there not be
terrible reactions ?

Servants in general are only grown-up children, and
the same considerations apply to them. A raw, un-

FAULT-FINDING. 27

trained Irish girl introduced into an elegant house has
her head bewildered in every direction. There are the
gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of
elegant and delicate conveniences, about which a thou-
sand little details are to be learned, the neglect of any
one of which may flood the house, or poison it with
foul air, ot bring innumerable inconveniences. The
setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it
involve fifty possibilities of mistake, each one of which
will grate on the nerves of a whole family. There is
no wonder, then, that the occasions of fault-finding in
families are so constant and harassing ; and there is no
wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on
the terms of the bear and the man who fell together
fifty feet down from the limb of a high tree, and lay at
the bottom of it, looking each other in the face in help-
less, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated,
despairing, and with good I'eason ; the maid is the same,
and with equally good reason. Yet let the mistress be
suddenly introduced into a printing-office, and required,
with what little teaching could be given her in a few
rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning
paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and
bewildered as Biddy in her beautifully-arranged house.
There are elegant houses which, from causes like
these, are ever vexed like the troubled sea that cannot
rest. Literally, their table has become a snare before
them, and that which should have been for their welfare,
a trap. Their gas, and their water, and their fire, and
their elegancies and ornaments, all in unskilled, blun-

28 LITTLE FOXES.

(lering hands, seem only so many ginis in the hands of
Satan, through which he fires at their Christian graces
day and night, — so that, if their house is kept in order,
their temper and religion are not.

I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands
of women who are, in will and purpose, real saints. Their
souls go up to lieavcn — its love, its purity, its rest —
with every liymn and prayer and sacrament in church ;
and they come home to he mortified, disgraced, and
made to despise themselves, for the unlovely tempers,
the hasty words, the cross looks, the universal nervous
irritability, that result from this constant jarring of
finely toned chords under unskilled hands.

Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping
on ashes, as means of saintship ! there is no need of
them in our country. Let a woman once look at her
domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her scourges,
— accept them,- — rejoice in them, — smile and be quiet,
silent, patient, and loving under them, — and the con-
vent can teach her no more ; she is a victorious saint.

When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong
way by Paddy, after the five hundredth time of expla-
nation, and the whole family awakes coughing, sneezing,
strangling, — when the gas is blown out in the nursery
by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks
in the danger of such a proceeding, — when the tumblers
on the dinner-table are found dim and streaked, after
weeks of training in the simple business of washing and
Aviping, — when the ivorj^-handled knives and forks are
left soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explana-

FAULT-FIXDTNG. 21)

tions of the consequences, — when four or five half-
civilized beings, above, below, and all over the house,
are constantly forgetting the most important things at
the very moment it is most necessary they should
I'emember them, — there is no hope for the mistress
morall}^ unless she can in very deed and truth accept
her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting. It is
not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities
and distresses ; but mothers and housewives also, if they
would learn of the apostle, might say, " When I am
weak, then am I strong."

The burden ceases to gall when we have learned
how to carry it. We can suffer j^atiently if we see any
good come of it, and say, as an old black woman of our
acquaintance did, of an event that crossed her purpose,
" Well, Lord, if it's you^ send it along."

But that this may be done, that home life, in our
unsettled, changing state of society, vnscy become peace-
ful and restful, there is one Christian grace, much
treated of by mystic writers, that must return to its
honour in the Christian Church. I mean — the grace of

SILENCE.

No words can express, no tongue can tell, the value
of NOT SPEAKING. " Spcecli is silvcrn, but silence is
golden," is an old and very precious proverb.

"But," say many voices, " w^hat is to become of us, if
we may not speak ? Must Ave not correct our children,
and our servants, and each other ? Must we let people
go on doing wrong to the end of the chapter ?"

" Ko ; fault must be found ; faults must be told, errors

30 LITTLE FOXES.

coiTected. Reproof and admonition are duties of house-
holders to their families, and of all true friends to one
another.

But, gentle reader, let us look over life, our own
lives and the lives of others, and ask, How much of the
fault-finding which prevails has the least tendency to do
any good? How much of it is well-timed, well-pointed,
deliberate, just, and so spoken as to be effective ?

" A wise reprover upon an obedient ear," is one of
the rare things spoken of by Solomon, — the rarest,
perhaps, to be met wjth. How many really religious
people put any of their religion into their manner of
performing this most difficult office ? We find fault
with a stove or furnace which creates heat only to go
up the chimney and not to warm the house. We say it is
wasteful. Just so wasteful often seem prayer-meetings,
church-services, and sacraments ; they create and excite
lovely, gentle, bol}^ feelings, — but, if these do not pass
out into the atmosphere of daily life, and warm and
clear the air of our homes, there is a great waste in
our religion.

We have been on our knees, confessing humbly that
we are as awkward in heavenly things, as unfit for the
Heavenly Jerusalem, as Biddy and Mike, and the little
beggar-girl on our door-steps, are for our parlours. We
have deplored our errors daily, hourly, and confessed
that " the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable," and then we draw
near in the Sacrament to that Incarnate Divinity whose
infinite love covers all our imperfections with the

FAULT-FINDING. 31

mantle of His perfections. But "vvhen we return, do
"we take our servants and children by the throat because
they are as untrained and awkward and careless in
earthly things as we have been in heavenly ? Does no
remembrance of Christ's infinite patience temper our
impatience, when we have spoken seventy times seven,
and our words have been disregarded ? There is no
mistake as to the sincerity of the religion which the
church excites. What we want is to have it used in
common life, instead of going up like hot air in a fire-
place to lose itself in the infinite abysses above.

In reproving and fault-finding, we have beautiful
examples in Holy Writ. When St. Paul has a reproof
to administer to delinquent Christians, how does he
temper it with gentleness and praise ! how does he
first make honourable note of all the good there is to
be spoken of! how does he give assurance of his prayers
and love ! — and when at last the arrow flies, it goes all
the straighter to the mark for this carefulness.

But there was a greater, a purer, a lovelier than
Paul, who made his home on earth, with twelve plain
men, ignorant, prejudiced, slow to learn, — and who to
the very day of his death were still contending on a
point which he had repeatedly explained, and troubling
His last earthly hours with the old contest, " Who
should be greatest." When all else failed, on His
knees before them as their servant, tenderly performing
for love the office of a slave. He said, " If I, your Lord
and Mastei', have washed your feet, ye also ought to
wash one another's feet."

32 LITTLE FOXES.

When parents, emploj-ers, and masters learn to re-
prove in this __spirit, reproofs will be more effective than
they now are. It was by the exercise of this spirit
that Fenelon transformed the proud, petulant, irritable,
selfish Duke of Burgundy, making him humble, gentle,
tolerant of others and severe only to himself: it was
he who had for his motto, that " Perfection alone can
bear with imperfection."

But apart from the fault-finding which has a definite
aim, how much is there that does not profess or intend
or try to do anything more than give vent to an irritated
state of feeling ! The nettle stings us, and we toss it
with both hands at our neighbour ; the fire burns us,
and we throw coals and hot ashes at all or sundry of
those about us.

There is fretfulness, a mizzling, drizzling rain of dis-
comforting remark ; there is grumbling, a north-east
storm that never clears : there is scolding, the thunder-
storm with lightning and hail. All these are worse
than useless ; they are positive sins, by whomsoever
indulged, — sins as great and real as many that are
shuddered at in polite society.

All these are for the most part but the venting
on our fellow-beinsrs of morbid feelincrs resultins:
from dyspepsia, overtaxed nerves, or general ill
health.

A minister eats too much mince-pic, goes to his
weekly lecture, and, seeing only half a dozen people
there, proceeds to grumble at those half-dozen for the
sins of such as stay away. " The church is cold, there

FAULT-FINDING. 33

is no interest in religion," and so on : a simjDle out-
pouring of the blues.

You and I do in one week the work we ought to do
in six ; we overtax nerve and brain, and then have
weeks of darkness in which everything at home seems
running to destruction. The servants never were so
careless, the children never so noisy, the house never
so disorderly, the State never so ill-governed, the Church
evidently going over to Antichrist. The only thing,
after all, in which the existing condition of affairs
differs from that of a week ago is, that we have used
up our nervous energ}'', and are looking at the world
through blue spectacles. AVe ought to resist the devil of
fault-finding at this point, and cultivate silence as a grace
till our nerves are rested. There are times when no one
should trust himself to judge his neighbours, or reprove
his children and servants, or find fault with his friends,
— for he is so sharp-set that he cannot strike a note
without striking too hard. Then is the time to try the
grace of silence, and, what is better than silence, the
power of prayer.

But it being premised that we are neiw^ to fret, never
to grumble, never to scold, and yet it being our duty in
some way to make known and get rectified the faults of
others, it remains to ask how ; and on this head we will
improvise a parable of two women.

Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed
of a power of moral principle that impresses one even
as sublime. All her perceptions of right and wrong
are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to the

34 LITTLE FOXES.

poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and
earnestly religious. In all tlie minutia3 of woman's life
she manifests an inconceivable precision and perfection.
Eveiything she does is perfectly done. She is true to
all her promises to the very letter, and so punctual that
railroad time might be kept by her instead of a chro-
nometer.

Yet, Tvith all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast
has not the faculty of making a happy home. She is
that most hopeless of fault-finders, — a fault-finder from
principle. She has a high correct standard for every-
thing in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts
down to the spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a
towel ; and to this exact standard she feels it her duty
to bring every one in her household. She does not
often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exer-
cises over her household a calm, inflexible "^severity
rebuking every fault ; she overlooks nothing ; she
excuses nothing ; she will accept of nothing in any
part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her
reproofs are aimed with a tnie and steady point, and
sent with a force that makes them felt by the most
obdurate.

Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and
seldom or never scolds, 3'et she drives eveiy one around
her to despair by the use of the calmest and most
elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love
her. Her husband — an impulsive, generous man, some-
what inconsiderate and careless in his habits — is at times
lierfectly desperate under the accumulated load of her

FAULT-FINDING. 35

disapprobation. Her cliildren regard her as inhabiting
some high, distant, unaiDproachable mountain-top of
goodness, whence she is alwaj'S looking down with
reproving eyes on naughty boys and girls. They
wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should
have children who, let them try to be good as hard as
they can, are always sure to do something dreadful
every day.

The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has
a high standard, and not that she purposes and means
to bring every one up to it, but that she does not take
the right way. She has set it down that to blame a
wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has
never learned that it is as much her duty to praise as to
blame, and that people are drawn to do right hy being
praised when they do it, rather than driven by being
blamed when they do not.

Eight across the way from Mrs. Standfast is Mrs. Easy,
a pretty little creature, wdth not a tithe of her moral
worth, — a merry, pleasure-loving woman, of no parti-
cular force of principle, whose great object in life is to
avoid its disagreeables and to secure its pleasures.

Little Mrs. Easy is adored by her husband, her chil-
dren, her servants, merely because it is her nature to
say pleasant things to every one. It is a mere tact of
pleasing which she uses without knowing it. While
Mrs. Standfast, surveying her well-set dining-table, runs
her keen eye over everything, and at last brings up
with, "Jane, look at that black spot on the salt-spoon!
I am astonished at your carelessness!" — Mrs. Easy

36 LITTLE FOXES.

would say, " ^^'lly, Jane, where did yon learn to set a
table so nicely ? All looking beautifully, except — all !
let's see — just give a rub to this salt-spoon ; — now all is
quite perfect." Mrs. Standfast's servants and children
hear onl}' of their failures; these are always before
them and her. Mrs. Easy's servants hear of their suc-
cesses. She praises their good points ; tells them they
are doing well in this, that, and the other particular ;
and finally exhorts them, on the strength of having
done so many things well, to improve in what is yet
lacking. Mrs. Easy's husband feels that he is always a
hero in her eyes, and her children feel that they are
dear good children, notwithstanding Mrs. Easy some-
times has her little tiffs of displeasure, and scolds
roundly when something falls out as it should not.

The two families show how much more may be done
by a very ordinary woman, through the mere instinct
of praising and pleasing, than by the greatest worth,
piety, and principle, seeking to lift human nature by a
lever that never was meant to lift it by.

The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are
as often perpetuated by despair as by any other one
thing. Have we not all been burdened by a conscious-
ness of faults that we were slow to correct because we
felt discouraged ? Have we not been sensible of a real
help sometimes from the presence of a friend who
thought well of us, believed in us, set our virtues in the
best light, and put our faults in the background ?

Let us depend upon it, that the flesh and blood that
are in us — the needs, the wants, the despondencies —

FAULT-FINDING. 37

are in each of onr fellows, iu every awkward servant
and careless child.

Finally, let us all resolve, —

First, to attain to the grace of silence.

Second, to deem all fault-finding that does no good,
a SIN ; and to resolve, when we are happy ourselves,
not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbours by
calling on them to remark every painful and disagreeable
feature of their daily life.

Third, to practise the grace and virtue of praise.
We have all been taught that it is our duty to praise
God, but few of us have reflected on our duty to praise
men ; and yet, for the same reason that we should
praise the divine goodness, it is our duty to praise
human excellence.

We should praise our friends, — our near and dear
ones ; we should look on and think of their virtues
till their faults fade away; and when we love most,
and see most to love, then only is the wise time wisely
to speak of what should still be altered.

Parents should look out for occasions to commend
their children, as carefully as they seek to reprove
their faults ; and employers should praise the good their
servants do as strictly as they blame the evil.

Whoever undertakes to use this weapon will find that
praise goes farther in many cases than blame. Watch
till a blundering servant does something well, and then
praise him for it, and you will see a new fire lighted in
the eye, and often you will find that in that one respect
at least you have secured excellence thenceforward.

38 LITTLE FOXES.

When you blame, whicli should be seldom, let it bo
alone with the person, quietly, considerately, and with
all the tact you are possessed of. The fashion of re-
proving children and servants in the presence of others
cannot be too much deprecated. Pride, stubbornness,
and self-will are aroused by this, while a more private
reproof might be received with thankfulness.

As a general rule, I would say, treat children in these
respects just as you would grown people ; they are
grown people in miniature, and need as careful con-
sideration of their feelings as any of us.

Lastly, let us all make a bead-roll, a holy rosary, of
all that is good and agreeable in our position, our sur-
roundings, our daily lot, of all that is good and agree-
able in our friends, our children, our servants, and
charge ourselves to repeat it daily, till the habit of our
minds be -to praise and to commend; and so doing,
we shall catch and kill one Little Fox who hath destroj'ed
many tender grapes.

II.

IRRITABILITY.

IT was tliat Christmas-day that did it ; I'm quite con-
vinced of that ; and the way it was is what I am
going to tell you.

You see, among the various family customs of us
Crowfields, the observance of all sorts oi fetes and fes-
tivals has always been a matter of prime regard ; and
among all the festivals of the round, ripe year, none is
so joyous and honoured among us as Christmas.

Let no one upon this prick up the ears of Archaeology,
and tell us that by the latest calculations of chrono-
logists our ivy-grown and holly-mantled Christmas is
all a hum, — that it has been demonstrated, by all sorts
of signs and tables, that the august event it celebrates
did not take place on the 25th of December. Supposing
it be so, what have we to do with that ? If so awful, so
joyous an event ever took place on our earth, it is
surely worth commemoration. It is the event we cele-
brate, not the time. And if all Christians for eighteen
hundred years, while warring and wrangling on a
thousand other points, have agreed to give this one
25th of December to peace and good-will, who is
he that shall gainsay them, and, for an historic
scruple, turn his back on the friendly greetings of
Christendom ? Such a man is cajDable of rewriting

40 LITTLE FOXES.

^lilton's Christmas Hymn in the style of Sternhold and
Hopkins.

In our house, however, Christmas has always been
a high day, a day whose expectation has held waking all
the little eyes in our bird's nest, when as yet there were
only little ones there, each sleeping with one eye open,
hoping to be the happy first to wish the merry Christ-
mas and grasp the wonderful stocking.

This year, our whole family train of married girls
and boys, with the various toddling tribes thereto be-
longing, held high festival around a wonderful Christ-
mas-tree, the getting-up and adorning of which had
kept my wife and Jennie and myself busy for a week
beforehand. If the little folks think these trees grow
up in a night, without labour, they know as little
about them as they do about jnost of the other bless-
ings which rain down on their little thoughtless heads.
Such scrambling and clambering and fussing and tying
and untying, such alterations and rearrangements, such
agilities in getting up and down and everywhere, to
tie on tapers and gold balls and glittering things
innumerable, — to hang airy dolls in graceful positions,
— to make branches bear stiffly up under loads of pretty
things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom
upward ! Tart and parcel of all this was I, Christo-
pher, most reckless of rheumatism, most careless of
dignity, the round, bald top of my head to bo seen
emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the
spruce, now devising an airy settlement for some
gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting far back on a stiff

IRRITABILITY. 41

branch Tom's new little skates, now balancing bags of
sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately
with some contumacious taper that would turn slant-
wise or crosswise, or anywise but upward as a Chris-
tian taper should, — regardless of Mrs. Crowfield's
gentle admonitions and suggestions, sitting up to most
dissipated hours, springing out of bed suddenly, to
change some arrangement in the middle of the night,
and up at dawn, long before the laz}^ sun, to execute
still other arrangements. If that Christmas-tree had
been a fort to be taken, or a campaign to be planned,
I could not have spent more time and strength on it.
My zeal so far outran even that of sprightly Miss Jennie,
that she could account for it only by saucily suggesting
that papa must be fast getting into second childhood.

But didn't we have a splendid lighting-up ? Didn't
I and my youngest grandson, little Tom, head the pro-
cession magnificent in paper soldier caps, blowing tin
trumpets and beating drums, as we marched round the
twinkling glories of our Christmas-tree, all glittering
with red and blue and green tapers, and with a splendid
angel on top with great gold wings, the cutting-oiit
and adjusting of which had held my eyes waking for
nights before ? I had had oceans of trouble with that
angel, owing to an unlucky sprain in his left wiilg,
which had required constant surgical attention through
the week, and which I feared might fall loose again at
the important and blissful moment of exhibition : but
no, the Fates were in our favour ; the angel behaved
beautifully, and kept his wings as crisp as possible, and

42 LITTLE FOXES.

the tapers all burned splendidly, and the little folks
were as crazy with delight as m}^ most ardent hopes
could have desired ; and then we romped and played
and frolicked as long as little eyes could keep open,
and long after ; and so passed away our Christmas.

I had forgotten to speak of the Christmas-dinner, that
solid feast of fat things on which we also luxuriated.
l\Irs. Crowfield outdid all household traditions in that
feast : the turkey and the chickens, the jellies and the
sauces, the pies and the jiudding, behold, are they not
written in the tablets of Memory which remain to this
day?

The holidays passed away hilariously, and at New-
Year's-Day I, according to time-honoured custom, went
forth to make my calls and see my fair friends, while
my wife and daughters stayed at home to dispense the
hospitalities of the day to their gentlemen friends. All
was merry, cheerful, and it was agreed on all hands
that a more joyous holiday season had never flown
over us.

But, somehow, the week after, I began to be sensible
of a running-down in the wheels. I had an article to
write for the Atlantic, but felt mopish and could not
write. My dinner had not its usual relish, and I had
an indefinite sense everywhere of something going
Avrong. My coal-bill came in, and I felt sure we
were being extravagant, and that our John Furnace
wasted the coal. My grandsons and granddaughters
came to see us, and I discovered that they had high-
pitched voices, and burst in without wiping their shoes,

IRRITABILITY. 43

and it suddenly occurred poweifully to my mind that
they were not being veil brought up, — evidently, they
were growing up rude and noisy. I discovered
several tumblers and plates with the edges chipped,
and made bitter reflections on the carelessness of Irish
servants ; our crockery was going to destruction, along
with the rest. Then, on opening one of my paper-
drawers, I found that Jennie's one drawer of worsted
had overflowed into two or three ; Jennie was grow-
ing careless ; besides, worsted is dear, and girls knit
away small fortunes without knowing it, on little duds
that do nobody any good. Moreover, Maggie had three
times put my slippers into the hall-closet, instead of
leaving them where I wanted, under my study-table.
Mrs. Crowfield ought to look after things more; every
servant, from end to end of the house, was getting out
of the traces ; it was strange she did not see it.

All this I vented from time to time, in short, crusty
sayings and doings, as freely as if I hadn't just written
an article on " Little Foxes " in the last Atlantic, till
at length my eyes were opened on my own state and
condition.

It was evening, and I had just laid up the fire in the
most approved style of architecture, and projecting my
feet into my slippers, sat spitefully cutting the leaves
of a caustic review.

Mrs. Crowfield took the tongs and altered the dispo-
sition of a stick.

" My dear," I said, *' I do wish you'd let the fire
alone, — you always put it out."

44 LITTLE FOXES.

"I was merely admitting a little air between the
sticks," said my wife.

*' You always make matters worse when you touch
the fire."

As if in contradiction, a bright tongue of flame
darted up between the sticks, and the fire began chat-
tering and snapping defiance at me. Now, if there's
anything which would provoke a saint, it is to be
jeered and snapped at in that way by a man's own
fire. It 's an unbearable impertinence. I threw out
my leg impatiently, and hit Kover, who yelped a
yelp that finished the upset of my nerves. I gave
him a hearty kick, that he might have something
to yelp for, and in the movement upset Jennie's
embroidery -basket.

" Oh, papa!"

" Confound your baskets and balls ! they are every-
where, so that a man can't move; useless, wasteful
things, too."

" Wasteful ?" said Jennie, colouring indignantly ; for
if there's anything Jennie piques herself upon, it's
economy.

*' Yes, wasteful, — wasting time and money both.
Here are hundreds of shivering poor to be clothed, and
Christian females sit and do nothing but crochet worsted
into useless knick-nacks. If they would be working
for the poor there would be some sense in it ; but it's
all just alike, no real Christianity in the world, — nothing
but organized selfishness and solf-indulgence."

" My dear," said Mrs. Crowfield, " you are not well to-

IRRITABILITY. 45

night. Things are not quite so desperate as they appear.
You haven't got over Christmas- week."

" I am well. Never was better. But I can see, I
hope, what's before my eyes ; and the fact is, Mrs. Crow-
field, things must not go on as they are going. There
must be more care, more attention to details. There's
Maggie, — that girl never does what she is told. You
are too slack with her. Ma'am. She will light the fire
with the last paper, and she won't put my slippers in
the right place ; and I can't have my stud}'- made the
general catch-all and menagerie for Eover and Jennie,
and her baskets and balls, and for all the family litter."

Just at this moment I overheard a sort of aside from
Jennie, who was swelling with repressed indignation at
my attack on her worsted. She sat with her back to
me, knitting energetically, and said, in a low, but very
decisive tone, as she twitched her yarn, —

" Xow if /should talk in that way, people would call
me cross, — and that's the whole of it."

I pretended to be looking into the fire in an absent-
minded state ; but Jennie's words had started a new
idea. Was that it? Was it, then, a fact, that the'house,
the servants, Jennie and her worsteds, Eover and Mrs.
Crowfield, were all going on pretty much as usual, and
that the only difficulty was that I was civss ? How many
times had I encouraged Eover to lie just where he was
lying when I kicked him ! How many times, in better
moods, had I complimented Jennie on her neat little
fancy-works, and declared that I liked the social com-
panionship of ladies' work-baskets among my papers!

46 LITTLE FOXES.

Yes, it was clear. After all, things were mucli as tliey
had been ; onl}^ I was cross.

Cross. I put it to myself in that simple, old-fashioned
word, instead of saying that I was out of spirits, or
nervous, or using any of the other smooth phrases with
which we good Christians cover up our little sins of
temper. ** Here you are, Christopher," said I to myself,
" a literary man, with a somewhat delicate nervous
organization and a sensitive stomach, and 3'ou have been
eating like a sailor or a ploughman; you have been
gallivanting and merry-making and playing the boy for
two weeks ; up at all sorts of irregular hours, and into
all sorts of boyish performances ; and the consequence
is, that, like a thoughtless young scapegrace, you have
used up in ten days the capital of nervous energy that
was meant to last you ten weeks. You can't eat 3'our
cake and have it too, Christopher. AVhen the nervous-
fluid source of cheerfulness, giver of pleasant sensations
and pleasant views, is all spent, 3'ou can't feel cheerful ;
things cannot look as they did when you were full of
life and vigour. When the tide is out, there is nothing
but unsightly, ill-smelling tide-mud, and you can't help
it ; but you can keep your senses, — 3'OU can know what
is the matter with you, — you can keep from visiting
your overdose of Christmas mince-pies and candies and
jocularities on the heads of Mrs. Crowfield, Eover, and
Jennie, whether in the form of virulent morality, pun-
gent criticisms, or a free kick, such as you just gave the
poor biute."

" Come here, Eover, poor dog !" said I, extending my

IRRITABILITY. 47

hand to Eover, who cowered at the farther corner of the
room, eyeing me wistfully, — "come here, 3"0U poor doggie,
and make up with your master. There, there ! A\'as
his master cross ? AVell, he knows it. We must forgive
and forget, old boy, mustn't we ?" And Eover nearly
broke his own back and tore me to pieces with his
tumultuous tail-waggings.

" As for 3^ou, puss," I said to Jennie, " I am much
obliged to you for your free suggestion. You must take
my cynical moralities for what they are worth, and put
your little traps into as many of my drawers as jou like."

In short, I made it up handsomely all around, — even
apologizing to Mrs. Crowfield, who, by-the-by, has
summered and wintered me so many years, and knows
all my airs and cuts and crinkles so well, that she took
my irritable, unreasonable spirit as tranquilly as if I
had been a baby cutting a new tooth.

" Of course, Chris, I knew what the matter was ; don't
disturb yourself," she said, as I began my apology ;
" we understand each other. But there is one thing I
have to say ; and that is, that your article ought to be
ready."

"Ah, well, then," said I, " like other great writers, I
shall make capital of my own sins, and treat of the
second little family fox : and his name is —

IREITABILITY.

Ireitability is, more than most unlovely states, a
sin of the flesh. It is not, like envy, malice, sjDite,
revenge, a vice which we may suppose to belong equally

48 LITTLE FOXES.

to an embodied or a disembodied spirit : in fact, it
comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything
I know of. There are some bodily states, some con-
ditions of the nerves, such that we could not conceive
of even an angelic spirit, confined in a body thus dis-
ordered, as being able to do an}^ more than simply
endure. It is a state of nervous torture ; and the
attacks which the wretched victim makes on others
are as much a result of disease as the snapping and
biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.

Then, again, there are other people who go through
life loving and beloved, desired in every circle, held up
in the church as examples of the power of religion, who,
after all, deserve no credit for these things. Their
spirits are lodged in an animal nature so tranquil, so
cheerful, all the sensations which come to them are so
fresh and vigorous and pleasant, that they cannot help
viewing the world charitabl}', and seeing everything
through a glorified medium. The ill-temper of others
does not provoke them ; perplexing business never sets
their nerves to vibrating ; and all their lives long they
walk in the serene sunshine of perfect animal health.

Look at Eover there. He is never nervous, never
cross, never snaps or snarls, and is ready, the moment
after the grossest affront, to wag the tail of forgiveness,
— all because kind Nature has put his dog's body to-
gether so that it always works harmoniously. If every
person in the world were gifted with a stomach and
nerves like his, it would be a far better and happier
world, no doubt. The man said a good thing who made

IRRITABILITY. 49"

tlie remark tHat the foundation of all intellectual and
moral worth must be laid in a good healthy animal.

Kow I think it is imdeniable that the peace and
happiness of the home-circle are very generally much
invaded by the recurrence in its members of these states
of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the
matter over, will see that his condition in life, the
character of his friends, his estimate of their virtues and
failings, his hopes and expectations, are all very much
modified by these things. Cannot we all remember
going to bed as very ill-used, persecuted individuals, all
whose friends were unreasonable, whose life was full of
trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-sing-
ing morning to find all these illusions gone with the
fogs of the night? Our friends are nice people, after
all ; the little things that annoyed us look ridiculous by
bright sunshine ; and we are fortunate individuals.

The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is
concerned, must consist of two things : first, to keep
ourselves out of irritable bodily states ; and, second, to
understand and control these states, when we cannot
ward them off.

Of course, the first of these is the most important;
and yet, of all things, it seems to be least looked into
and understood. We find abundant rules for the govern-
ment of the tongue and temper; it is a slough into
which, John Bunyan hath it, cart-loads of wholesome
instructions have been thrown ; but how to get and
keep that healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves
which takes away the temptation to ill-temper and anger

50 LITTLE FOXES.

is 'a subject which moral and religious teachers seem
scarcely to touch upon.

Now, without running into technical, physiological
language, it is evident, as regards us human beings, that
there is a power by which we live and move and have
our being, — by which the brain thinks and wills, the
stomach digests, the blood circulates, and all the differ-
ent provinces of the little man-kingdom do their work.
This something — call it nervous fluid, nervous power,
vital energy, life-force, or anything else that you will —
is a perfectly understood, if not a definable thing. It is
13lain, too, that people possess this force in very different
degrees : some generating it as a high-pressure engine
does steam, and using it constantly, with an apparently
inexhaustible flow ; and others who have little, and
spend it quickly. We have a common saying, that this
or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous,
irritable states of temper are the mere ph3'sical result
of a used-up condition. The person has overspent his
nervous energy, — like a man who should eat up on
Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a
week, and go growling and faint through the other
days; or the quantity of nervous force which was
wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is
seized on by some one monopolizing portion, and used
up to the loss and detriment of the rest. Thus, with
men of letters, an exorbitant brain expends on its own
workings what belongs to the other offices of the body ;
the stomach has nothing to carry on digestion ; the
secretions are badly made ; and the imperfectly assimi-

IRRITABILTTY. 51

lated nourishment that is conveyed to every little nerve
and tissue, carries with it an acrid, irritating quality, pro-
ducing general restlessness and discomfort. So men
and women go struggling on through their threescore
and ten years, scarcely one in a thousand knowing
through life that perfect balance of parts, that appro-
priate harmony of energies, that make a healthy, kindly
animal condition, predisposing to cheerfulness and
goodwill.

We Americans are, to begin with, a nervous, excitable
people. Multitudes of children, probably the great
majority in the upper walks of life, are born into the
world with weaknesses of the nervous organization, or
of the brain or stomach, which make them incapable of
any strong excitement or prolonged exertion without
some lesion or derangement ; so that they are continually
being checked, laid up, and invalided in the midst of
their drugs. Life here in America is so fervid, so fast,
our climate is so stimulating, with its clear, bright skies,
its rapid and sudden changes of temperature, that the
tendencies to nervous disease are constantly aggravated.

Under these circumstances, unless men and women
make a conscience, a religion, of saving and sparing
something of themselves expressly for home-life and
home-consumption, it must follow that home will often
be merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when wo
are used up and irritable.

Papa is up and off, after a hasty breakfast, and drives
all day in his business, putting into it all there is in
him, letting it drink up brain and nerve and body and

52 LITTLE FOXES.

soul, and coming home jaded and exhausted, so that he
cannot bear the cry of the haby, and the frolics and
pattering of the nursery seem horrid and needless confu-
sion. The little ones say, in their plain vernacular,
*' Papa is cross."

Mamma goes out to a party that keeps her up till one
or two in the morning, breathes bad air, eats indigestible
food, and the next day is so nervous that every straw
and thread in her domestic path is insufferable.

Papas that pursue business thus, day after day, and
mammas that go into company, as it is called, night after
night, what is there left in or of them to make an
agreeable fireside with, to brighten their home and
inspire their children ?

True, the man says he cannot help himself, — business
requires it. But what is the need of rolling up money
at the rate at which he is seeking to do it ? Why not
have less, and take some time to enjoy his home, and
cheer up his wife, and form the minds of his children ?
Why spend himself down to the last drop on the world,
and give to the dearest friends he has only the bitter
dregs ?

Much of the preaching which the pulpit and the
Church have levelled at fashionable amusements has
failed of any effect at all, because wrongly put. A
cannonade has been opened upon dancing, for example,
and all for reasons that will not, in the least, bear look-
ing into. It is vain to talk of dancing as a sin because
practised in a <lying world where souls are passing into
eternity. If dancing is a sin for this reason, so is playing

IRRITABILITY. 53

marbles, or frolicking with one's children, or enjoying
a good dinner, or doing fifty other things which
nobod}^ ever dreamed of objecting to.

If the preacher were to say that anything is a sin
which uses np the strength we need for daily duties,
and leaves us fagged out and irritable at just those
times and in just those places when and where we need
most to be healthy, cheerful, and self-possessed, he would
say a thing that none of his hearers would dispute. If
he should add, that dancing-parties, beginning at ten
o'clock at night and ending at four o'clock in the morn-
ing, do use up the strength, weaken the nerves, and
leave a person wholly unfit for any home duty, he would
also be saying what verj^ few people would deny ; and
then his case would be made out. If he should say that
it is wrong to breathe bad air and fill the stomach with
unwholesome dainties, so as to make one restless, ill-
natured, and irritable for days after, he would also say
what few would deny, and his preaching might have
some hope of success.

The true manner of judging of the worth of amuse-
ments is to try them by their effects on the nerves and
spirits the day after. True amusement ought to be, as
the word indicates, recreation, — something that refreshes,
turns us out anew, rests the body and mind by change,
and gives cheerfulness and alacrity to our return to duty.

The true objection to all stimulants, alcoholic and
narcotic, consists simply in this, — that they are a foiTa
of overdraft on the nei^vous energy, which helps us to
use up in one hour the strength of whole days.

4 LITTLE FOXES.

A man uses up all the fair, legal interest of nervous
power by too much business, too much care, or too much
amusement. He has now a demand to meet. He has a
complicate account to make up, an essay or a sermon to
write, and he primes himself by a cup of coffee, a cigar,
a glass of spirits. This is exactly the procedure of a
man who, having used the interest of his money, begins
to dip into the principal. The strength a man gets in
this way is just so much taken out of his life-blood ; it
is borrowing of a merciless creditor, who will exact, in
time, the pound of flesh nearest his heart.

Much of the irritability which spoils home happiness
is the letting down from the over-excitement of stimulus.
Some will drink coffee, when they own every day that
it makes them nervous ; some will drug themselves
with tobacco, and some with alcohol, and, for a few
hours of extra brightness, give themselves and their
friends many hours when amiability or agreeableness
is quite out of the question. There are people calling
themselves Christians who live in miserable thraldom,
for ever in debt to Nature, for ever overdrawing on their
just resources, and using up their patrimony, because
they have not the moral courage to break away from
a miserable appetite.

The same may be said of numberless indulgences of
the palate, which tax the stomach beyond its power,
and bring on all the horrors of indigestion. It is almost
impossible for a confirmed dyspeptic to act like a good
Christian ; but a good Christian ought not to become
a confinned dyspeptic. Eeasonable self-control, ab-

IRRITABILITY. 55

staining from all unseasonable indulgence, may prevent
or put an end to dyspepsia, and many suffer and make
their friends suffer only because they will persist in
eating what they know is hurtful to them.

But it is not merely in worldly business, or fashion-
able amusements, or the gratification of appetite, that
people are tempted to overdraw and use up in advance
their life-force : it is done in ways more insidious,
because connected with our moral and religious faculties.
There are religious exaltations beyond the regular pulse
and beatings of ordinary nature, that quite as surely
gravitate downward into the mire of irritability. The
ascent to the third heaven lets even the Apostle down
to a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet
him.

. It is the temptation to natures in which the moral
faculties predominate to overdo in the outward expres-
sion and activities of religion till they are used np and
irritable, and have no strength left to set a good example
in domestic life.

The Eeverend Mr. X. in the pulpit to-day appears
with the face of an angel; he soais away into those
regions of exalted devotion where his people can but
faintly gaze after him; he tells them of the victory
that overcome th the world, of an immoved faith that
fears no evil, of a serenity of love that no outward
event can ruffle ; and all look after him and wonder,
and wish they could so soar.

Alas ! the exaltation which inspires these sublime
conceptions, these celestial ecstasies, is a double and

56 LITTLE FOXES.

treble draft on Nature, — and poor Mrs. X. knows when
she hears him preaching, that days of miserable re-
action are before her. lie has been a fortnight driving
before a gale 'of strong excitement, doing all the time
twice or thrice as much as in his ordinary state he
could, and sustaining himself by the stimulus of strong
coffee. He has preached or exhorted every night, and
conversed with religious inquirers every day, seeming
to himself to become stronger and stronger, because
every day more and more excitable and excited. To
his hearers, with his flushed sunken cheek and his
glittering eye, he looks like some spiritual being just
trembling on his flight for upper worlds ; but to poor
Mrs. X., whose husband he is, things wear a very dif-
ferent aspect. Her woman and mother instincts tell
her that he is drawing on his life-capital with both
liands, and that the hours of a terrible settlement must
come, and the days of darkness will be many. He who
spoke so beautifully of the peace of a soul made perfect
will not be able to bear the cry of his baby or the
pattering feet of any of the poor little Xs., who must
be sent

" Anywhere, anywhere,
Out ot his bight ;"

he who discoursed so devoutly of perfect trust in God
will be nei"vous about the butcher's bill, sure of sroinir
to ruin because both ends of the salary don't meet ;
and he who could so admiringly tell of the silence of
Jesus under prvoocation will but too often speak un-

IRRITABILITY. 67

advisedly with his lips. Poor Mr. X. will be morally
insane for days or weeks, and absolutely incapable of
preaching Christ in the way that is the most effective,
by setting him forth in his own daily example.

What then ? must we not do the work of the Lord ?

Yes, certainly ; but the fii'st work of the Lord, that
for which provision is to be made in the first place, is
to set a good example as a Christian man. Better
labour for years steadily, diligently, doing every day
only what the night's rest can repair, avoiding those
cheating stimulants that overtax Nature, and illustrating
the sayings of the pulpit by the daily life in the family,
than to pass life in exaltations and depressions.

The same principles apply to hearers as to preachers.
Eeligious services must be judged of like amusements,
by their effect on the life. If an overdose of prayers,
hymns, and sermons leaves us tired, nervous, and cross^
it is only not quite as bad as an overdose of fashionable
folly.

It could be wished that in every neighbourhood there
might be one or two calm, sweet, daily services which
should morning and evening unite for a few solemn
moments the hearts of all as in one family, and feed
with a constant, unnoticed, daily supply, the lamp of
faith and love. Such are some of the daily prayer-
meetings which for eight or ten years past have held
their even tenor in some of our New England cities,
and such the morning and evening services which we
are glad to see obtaining in the Episcopal churches.
Everything which brings religion into habitual contact

58 LITTLE FOXES.

Avith life, and makes it part of a healthy, cheerful
average living, -we hail as a sign of a better da3\ Nothing
is so good for health as daily devotion. It is the best
soother of the nei'ves, the best antidote to care ; and we
trust ere long that all Chiistian people will be of one
mind in this, and that neighbourhoods will be families
gathering daily around one altar, praying not for them-
selves merel}^, but for each other.

The conclusion of the whole matter is this : Set apart
some provision to make merry with at home, and guard
that resei-ve as religiously as the priests guarded the
shew-bread in the temple. However great you are,
however good, however wide the general interests that
you may control, you gain nothing by neglecting home-
duties. You must leave enough of yourself to be able
to bear and forbear, give and forgive, and be a source
of life and cheerfulness around the hearthstone. The
great sign given by the Prophets of the coming of
the Millennium is, — what do you suppose ? — " He shall
turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the
heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and
smite the earth with a curse."

Thus much on avoiding unhealthy, irritable states.

But it still remains that a large number of people
will be subject to them unavoidabl}' ; for these reasons —

First. The use of tobacco, alcohol, and other kindred
stimulants, for so many generations, has vitiated the
brain and nervous system, so that it is not what it was
in former times. Miehelet treats of this subject quite
at large in some of his late works ; and we have to

IRRITABILITY. 59

face the fact of a generation born with an impaired
nervous organization, who will need constant care and
wisdom to avoid unhealthy, morbid irritation.

There is a temperament called the hypochondriac, to
which many persons, some of them the brightest, the
most interesting, the most gifted, are born heirs, — a
want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends
constantly to periods of high excitement and of con-
sequent depression, — an unfortunate inheritance for the
possessor, though accompanied often with the greatest
talents. Sometimes, too, it is the unfortunate lot of
those who have not talents, who bear its burdens and
its anguish without its rewards.

People of this temperament are subject to fits of
gloom and despondency, of nervous irritability and
suffering, which darken the aspect of the whole world
to them, which present lying reports of their friends,
of themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and
of all with which they have to do.

Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted
is to understand themselves and their tendencies, to
know that these fits of gloom and depression are just
as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache, — to
know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill
the mind with wretched illusions, to make them seem
miserable and unlovely to themselves, to make their
nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to make all
events appear to be going wrong and tending to de-
struction and ruin.

The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half

60 LITTLE FOXES.

removed when a man once knows that he has it, and
recognizes it for a disease, — when he does not tiiist
himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if there
were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees.
lie who has not attained to this wisdom overwhelms
his friends and his family with the waters of bitterness ;
he stings with unjust accusations, and makes his fire-
side dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but
false as the ravings of fever.

A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out
what ails him, will shut his mouth resoluteh*, not to
give utterance to the dark thoughts that infest his soul.

A lady of great brilliancj' and wit, who was subject
to these periods, once said to me, " My dear sir, there
are times when I know I am possessed of the Devil, and
then I never let myself speak." And so this wise
woman carried her burden about with her in a deter-
mined, cheerful reticence, leaving always the impression
of a cheery, kindly temper, when, if she had spoken
out a tithe of what she thought and felt in her morbid
hours, she would have driven all her friends from her,
and made others as miserable as she was herself. She
was a sunbeam, a life-giving presence in every family,
by the power of self-knowledge and self-control.

Such victories as this are the victories of real saints.
But if the victim of these glooms is once tempted to
lift their heavy load by the use of any stimulus whatever^
he or she is a lost man or woman. It is from this
sad class more than any other that the vast army of
drunkards and opium-eaters is recruited. The hypo-

IRRITABILITY. 61

cliondriacs belong to the class so well described by that
brilliant specimen of them, Dr. Johnson, — those who
can practise abstinence, but not temperance. They
cannot, they will not be moderate. AYhatever stimu-
lant they take for relief will create an uncontrollable
appetite — a burning passion. The temperament itself
lies in the direction of insanit3% It needs the most
healthful, careful, even regime and management to keep
it within the bounds of soundness ; but the introduction
of stimulants deepens its gloom almost to madness.

All parents, in the education of their children, should
look out for and understand the signs of this tempera-
ment. It appears in early childhood ; and a child
inclined to fits of depression should be marked as a
subject of the most thoughtful, painstaking physical and
moral training. All over-excitement and stimulus
should be carefully avoided, whether in the way of
study, amusement, or diet. Judicious education may do
much to mitigate the unavoidable pains and penalties of
this most undesirable inheritance.

The second class of persons who need wisdom in the
control of their moods is that large class whose unfortu-
nate circumstances make it impossible for them to avoid
constantly overdoing and overdrawing upon their ner-
vous energies, and who, therefore, are always exhausted
and worn out. Poor souls, who labour daily under a
burden too heavy for them, and whose fretfulness and
impatience are looked upon with sorrow, not anger, by
pitying angels. Poor mothers, with families of little
children clinging round them, and a baby that never

62 LITTLE FOXES.

lets them sleep ; bard-working men, whose utmost toil,
day and night, scarcely keeps the wolf from the door ;
and all the hard-labouring, heavy-laden, on whom the
burdens of life press far beyond their strength.

Thpre are but two things we know of for these, — two
only remedies for the irritation that comes of these
exhaustions : the habit of silence tow^ards men, and of
speech towards God. The heart must utter itself or
burst; but let it learn to commune constantly and
intimately with One alwaj'S present and always s^^mpa-
thizing. This is the great, the only safeguard against
fretfulness and complaint. Thus and thus only can
peace spring out of confusion, and the breaking chords
of an overtaxed nature be strung anew to a celestial
harmony.

III.

EEPEESSION.

Being the true copy of a paper read in my librai'y to my
Wife and Jennie,

I AM going now to write on another cause of
family unhappiness, more subtile than either of
those before enumerated.

In the General Confession of the Church, we poor
mortals all unite in saying two things : " We have left
undone those things which we ought to have done, and
we have done those things which we ought not to have
done." These two heads exhaust the subject of human
frailty.

It is the things left undone which we ought to have
done, the things left unsaid which we ought to have
said, that constitute the subject I am now to treat of.

I remember my school-day speculations over an old
" Chemistry " I used to study as a text-book, which
informed me that a substance called Caloric exists in all
bodies. In some it exists in a latent state : it is there,
but it affects neither the senses nor the thermometer.
Certain causes develop it when it raises the mercury
and warms the hands. I remember the awe and wonder

G4 LITTLE FOXES.

^vitll which, even then, I reflected on the vast amount
of blind, deaf, and dumb comforts which nature had
thus stowed away. ITow mysterious it seemed to me
that poor families eveiy winter should be shivering,
freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had all this
latent caloric locked up in her store-closet, — when it
was all around them, in everything they touched and
handled.

In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to
this. There is a great life-giving, warming power
called Love, which exists in human hearts dumb and
unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power,
till set free by expression.

Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day, just before a
snow-storm, sit at work in a room that was judiciously
warmed by an exact thermometer ? You do not freeze,
but you shiver ; your fingers do not become numb with
cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for
more positive warmth. You look at the empty grate,
walk mechanically towards it, and, suddenly awaking,
shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long for
a shawl or cloak ; you draw yourself within yourself ;
you consult the thennometer, and are vexed to find that
there is nothing there to be complained of, — it is
standing most provokingly at the exact temperature that
all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be
the proper thing — the golden mean of health; and yet
perversely you shiver, and feel as if the face of an open
fire would be to you as the smile of an angel.

Such a lifelong chill, such an habitual shiver is the

EEPEESSION. 65

lot of many natures, whicli are not warm, when all
ordinary rules tell them they ought to be warm, — whose
life is cold and barren and meagre, — which never see
the blaze of an open fire.

I will illustrate my meaning by a page out of my
own experience.

I was twenty-one when I stood as groomsman for my
youngest and favourite sister Emily. I remember her
now as she stood at the altar, — a pale, sweet, flowery
face, in a half-shimmer between smiles and tears,
looking out of vapoury clouds of gauze and curls, and
all the vanishing m3"steries of a bridal morning.

Everybody thought the marriage such a fortunate
one ! — for her husband was handsome and manly, a man
of worth, of principle good as gold and solid as adamant,
— and Emm}^ had always been such a flossy little kitten
of a pet, so full of all sorts of impulses, so sensitive and
nervous, we thought her kind, strong, composed, stately
husband made just on purpose for her. " It was quite a
providence," sighed all the elderly ladies, who snifled
tenderly, and wiped their eyes, according to approved
custom, during the marriage ceremony.

I remember now the bustle of the day, — the confused
whirl of white gloves, kisses, bridemaids, and bride-
cakes, the losing of trunk keys, and breaking of lacings,
the tears of mamma — God bless her ! — and the jokes of
irreverent Christopher, who could, for the life of him,
see nothing so very dismal in the whole phantasmagoria,
and only wished he were as well off himself.

And so Emmy was wheeled away from us on the

66 LITTLE FOXES.

l)ridal tour, when her letters came back to us almost
every day, just like herself, merry, frisky little bits of
scratches, — as full of little nonsense beads as a glass
of champagne, and all ending with telling us how
perfect he was, and how good, and how well he took
care of her, and how happy, etc., etc. '

Then came letters from her new home. ITis house
was not yet built ; but while it was building ihey were
to live with his mother, who was " such a good
woman," and his sisters, who were also " such nice
women."

But somehow, after this, a change came over Emmy's
letters. They grew shorter ; they seemed measured in
their words ; and in place of sparkling nonsense and
bubbling outbursts of glee, came anxiously w^orded
praises of her situation and surroundings, evidently
wiitten for the sake of arguing herself into the belief
that she was extremely happy.

John, of course, was not as much with her now : he
had his business to attend to, which took him away all
day, and at night he was very tired. Still he was very
good and thoughtful of her, and how thankful she ought
to be ! And his mother was very good indeed, and did
all for her that she could reasonably expect, — of course
she could not bo like her own mamma ; and Mary and
Jane were very kind, — " in their way," she wrote, but
scratched it out, and wrote over it " very kind indeed."
They were the best people in the world, — a great deal
better than she was ; and she should try to learn a great
deal from them.

KEPRESSION. 67

"Poor little Em!" I said to myself, "I am afraid
tliese very nice people are slowly freezing and starving
her." And so, as I was going up into the mountains for
a summer tour, I thought I would accept some of John's
many invitations, and stop a day or two with them on
my way, and see how matters stood. John had been
known among us in college as a taciturn fellow, but
good as gold. I had gained his friendship by a regular
siege, carrying parallel after parallel, till, when I came
into the fort at last, I found the treasures worth taking.
I had little difficulty in finding Squire Evans's house.
It was the house of the village, — a true, model. New
England house, — a square, roomy, old-fashioned mansion,
which stood on a hill-side under a group of great, breezy
old elms, whose wide, wind-swung arms arched over it
like a leafy firmament. Under this bower the sub-
stantial white house, with all its window-blinds closed,
with its neat white fences all tight and trim, stood in
its faultless green turfy yard, a perfect Pharisee among
houses. It looked like a house all finished, done, com-
pleted, labelled, and set on a shelf for preservation;
but, as is usual with this kind of edifice in our dear New
England, it had not the slightest appearance of being
lived in, not a door or window open, not a wink or
blink of life : the only suspicion of human habita-
tion was the thin, pale-blue smoke from the kitchen
chimney.

And now for the people in the house.

In making a New England visit in winter, was it
ever your fortune to be put to sleep in the glacial spare

68 LITTLE FOXES.

chamber, that had been kept from time immemorial as
a refrigerator for guests, — that room Mhich no ray of
daily sunshine and daily living ever warms, whose
blinds are closed the whole year round, whose fireplace
knows only the complimentary blaze which is kindled a
few moments before bed-time in an atmosphere where
you can see your breath ? Do you remember the
process of getting warm in a bed of most faultless
material, with linen sheets and pillow-cases, slippery
and cold as ice ? You did get warm at last, but you
warmed your bed by giving out all the heat of your
own body.

Such are some families where you visit. They are of
the very best quality, like your sheets, but so cold that
it takes all the vitality you have to get them warmed
up to the talking-j^oint. You think, the first hour after
your arrival, that they must have heard some report to
your disadvantage, or that you misunderstood your
letter of invitation, or that you came on the wrong day ;
but no, you find in due course that you were invited,
you icere expected, and they are doing for j'ou the best
they can, and treating you as they suppose a guest
ought to be treated.

If 3'ou arc a warm-hearted, jovial fellow, and go on
feeling your way discreetly, you giadually thaw quite a
little place round yourself in the domestic circle, till, by
the time you are ready to leave, you really begin to
think it is agreeable to stay, and resolve that you will
come again. They are nice people ; they like you ; at
last you have got to feeling at home with them.

EEPRESSION. 69'

Three months after, you go to see them again, when
lo! there you are, back again just where you were at
first. The little spot which jou had thawed out is
frozen over again, and again you spend all your visit in
thawing it and getting your hosts limbered and in a
state for comfortable converse.

The first evening that I spent in the wide, roomy
front parlour, with Judge Evans, his wife, and daughters,
fully accounted for the change in Emmy's letters.
Eooms, I verily believe, get saturated with the aroma
of their spiritual atmosphere ; and there are some so
stately, so correct, that they would paralyze even the
friskiest kitten, or the most impudent Scotch terrier. At
a glance you perceive, on entering, that nothing but
correct deportment, an erect posture, and strictly
didactic conversation is possible there.

The family, in fact, were all eminently didactic, — bent
on improvement, laboriously useful. Not a good work
or charitable enterprise could put forth its head in the
neighbourhood, of which they were not the support
and life. Judge Evans was the stay and staff of the

village and township of ; he bore up the pillars

thereof. Mrs. Evans was known in the gates for all
the properties and deeds of the virtuous woman, as set
forth by Solomon ; the heart of her husband did safely
I trust in her. But when I saw them that evening,

sitting, in erect propriety, in their respective corners
[ on each side of the great, stately fireplace, with its tall,

glistening brass andirons, its mantel adorned at either
end with plated candlesticks, with the snuffer-tray in

70 LITTLE FOXES.

the middle, — she so collectedly measuring her words,
talkinp; in all those well-worn grooves of correct con-
versation which are designed, as the phrase goes, to
•' entertain strangers," and the Misses Evans, in the
best of grammar and rhetoric, and in most projier time
and way possible, showing themselves for what they
were, most high-principled, well-informed, intelligent
women, — I set myself to speculate on the cause of the
extraordinary^ sensation of stiffness and restraint which
pervaded me, as if I had been dipped in some petrifying
spring, and was beginning to feel myself slightly crust-
ing over on the exterior.

This kind of conversation is such as admits quite
easily of one's carrj^ing on another course of thought
within ; and so, as I found myself like a machine,
striking in now and then in good time and tune, I
looked at Judge Evans, sitting there so serene, self-
poised, and cold, and began to wonder if he had ever
been a boy, a young man, — if IMrs. Evans ever was a
girl, — if he was ever in love with her, and what he did
when he was.

I thought of the lock of Emmy's hair which I had
observed in John's writing-desk in days when he M'^as
falling in love with her, — of sundry little movements in
which, at awkward moments, I had detected my grave
and serious gentleman when I had stumbled acci-
dentally upon the pair in moonlight strolls, or retired
corners, — and wondered whether the models of pro-
priety before me had ever been convicted of any such
human weaknesses. Now, to be sure, I could as soon

REPRESSION. 71

imagine the stately tongs to walk up and kiss the shovel
as conceive of any such bygone efiusion in those dig-
nified individuals. But how did they get acquainted ?
how came they ever to be married ?

I looked at John, and thought I saw him 'gradually
stififening and subsiding into the very image of his
father. As near as a young fellow of twenty-five can
resemble an old one of sixty-two, he was growing to be
exactl}' like him, with the same upright carriage, the
same silence and reserve. Then I looked at Emmy :
she, too, was changed, — she, the wild little pet, all of
whose jpretty individualities were dear to us, — that little
unpunctuated scrap of life's poetry, full of little excep-
tions referable to no exact rule, only to be tolerated
under the wide score of poetic license. Now, as she sat
between the two Misses Evans, I thought I could detect
a bored, anxious expression on her little mobile face, —
an involuntary watchfulness and self-consciousness, as
if she were trying to be good on some quite new pat-
tern. She seemed nervous about some of my jokes, and
her eye went apprehensively to her mother-in-law in
the corner ; she tried hard to laugh and make things go
merrily for me ; she seemed sometimes to look an
apology for me to them, and then again for them to me.
For myself, I felt that perverse inclination to shock
people which sometimes comes over one in such situa-
tions. I had a great mind to draw Emmy on to my
knee and commence a brotherly romp with her, to give
John a thump on his very upright back, and to propose
to one of the Misses Evans to strike up a waltz, and get

72 LITTLE FOXES.

tliG parlour into a general whirl before the very face
and eyos of propriety in the corner : but " the spirits "
were too strong for me ; I couldn't do it.

I remembered the innocent, saucy freedom with which
Emmy used to treat her John in the da3^s of their
engagement, — the little ways, half loving, half mis-
chievous, in which she alternately petted and domi-
neered over him. Now she called him " Mr. EvaiLS,"
with an anxious affectation of matronly gravity. Had
they been lecturing her into these conjugal proprieties?
Probably not. I felt sure, by what I now experienced
in myself, that, were I to live in that family one week,
all such little deviations from the one accepted pattern
of propriety would fall off, like many-coloured sumach-
leaves after the first hard frost. I began to feel myself
slowly stiffening— my courage getting gently chilly. I
tried to tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly,
because I felt in the air around me that parts of it were
too vernacular and emphatic ; and then, as a man who
is freezing makes desperate efforts to throw off the spell,
and finds his brain beginning to turn, so I was begin-
ning to be slightly insane, and was haunted with a
desire to say some horribly improper or wicked thing
which should start them all out of their chairs. Though
never given to profane expressions, I perfectly hankered
to let out a curtain round, unvarnished, wicked word,
which I knew would create a tremendous commotion
on the surface of this enchanted mill-pond, — in fact,
I was so afraid that I should make some such mad
demonstration, that I rose at an early hour and begged

REPRESSION. 73'

leave to retire. Emmy sprang up with, apparent relief,
and offered to get my candle and marshal me to my
room.

When she had ushered me into the chilly hospitality
of that stately apartment, she seemed suddenly disen-
chanted. She sat down the candle, ran to me, fell on
my neck, nestled her little head under my coat, laugh-
ing and crying, and calling me her dear old boy ; she
pulled my whiskers, pinched my ear, rummaged my
pockets, danced round me in a sort of wild joy, stunning
me with a volley of questions, without stopping to hear
the answer to one of them ; in short, the wild little elf
of old days seemed suddenly to come back to me, as I
sat down and drew her on to my knee.

*' It does look so like home to see you, Chris! — dear,
dear home ! — and the dear old folks ! There never,
never was such a home ! — everybody there did just
what they wanted to, didn't they, Chris ? — and we love
each other, don't we ?"

" Emmy," said I, suddenly, and very improperly,
" you aren't happy here."

" Xot happy I" she said, with a half-frightened look,
— " what makes you say so ? Oh, you are mistaken. I
have everything to make me happy. I should be very
unreasonable and wicked if I were not. I am very,
very happy, I assure you. Of course, you know, every-
body can't be like our folks at home. 'That I should not
expect, you know, — people's ways are different, — but
then, when you know people are so good, and all that,
why, of course you must be thankful, — be happy. It's

74 LITTLE FOXES.

better for me to learn to control my feelings, you know,
and not to give way to impulses. They are all so good
here, they never give way to their feelings, — they
always do right. Oh, the}'- are quite wonderful !"
" And agreeable ?" said I.

" Oh, Chris, we musn't think so much of that. They
certainly aren't pleasant and easy, as people at home
are ; but they are never cross, they never scold, they
always are good, and we oughtn't to think so much of
living to be happy ; we ought to think more of doing
right, doing our duty, don't you think so ?"

" All undeniable truth, Emmy ; but, for all that,
John seems stiff as a ramrod, and their front parlour is
like a tomb. You musn't let them petrify him."
Her face clouded over a little.

" John is different here from what he was at our
house. He has been brought up differently^ — oh, en-
tirely differently from what we were ; and when he
comes back into the old house, the old business, and
the old place between his father and mother and sisters,
he goes back into the old ways. He loves me all the
same, but he does not show it in the same ways, and I
must learn, you know, to take it on trust. He is very
busy, — works hard all day, and all for me ; and mother
says women are unreasonable that ask any other proof of
love from their husbands than what they give by work-
ing for them all the time. She never lectures me, but
I know she thought I was a silly little petted child, and
she told me one day how she brought up John. She
never petted him; she put him away alone to sleep^

KErEESSION. 75

from the time lie was six months old ; she never fed him
out of his regular hours when he was a baby, no matter
how much he cried ; she never let him talk baby-talk,
or have any baby- talk talked to him, but was very care-
ful to make him speak all his words plain from the very
first ; she never encouraged him to express his love by
kisses or caresses, but taught him that the only proof of
love was exact obedience. 1 remember John's telling
me of his running to her once and hugging her round
the neck, when he had come in without wiping his
shoes, and she took off his arms and said, ' My son, this
isn't the best way to show love. I should be much
better pleased to have you come in 'quietly and wipe
your shoes than to come and kiss me when you forget
to do what I say.' "

" Dreadful old jade !" said I, irreverently, being then
only twenty-three.

" Now, Chris, I won't have anything to say to you, if
this is the way you are going to talk," said Emily,
pouting, though a mischievous gleam darted into her
eyes. " Eeally, however, I think she carries things
too far, though she is so good. I only said it to excuse
John, and show how he was brought up."

" Poor fellow !" said I. " I know now why he is so
hopelessly shut up, and walled up. Kever a warmer
heart than he keeps stowed away there, inside the
fortress, with the drawbridge down and moat all
round,"

" They are all warm-hearted inside," said Emily.
" Would you think she didn't love him ? Once when

7G LITTLE FOXES.

he was sick, slio watched with him seventeen nights
without taking off her clothes ; she scarcely would
eat all the time : Jane told me so. She loves him
better than she loves herself. It's perfectly dreadful,
sometimes, to see how intense she is when anything
concerns him ; it's her principle that makes her so cold
and quiet."

" And a devilish one it is !" said I.

" Chris, you are really growing wicked !"

" I use the word seriously, and in good faith," said I.
*' Who but the Father of Evil ever devised such plans
for making goodness hateful, and keeping the most
heavenly part of our nature so under lock and key, that,
for the greater part of our lives, we get no use of it ?
Of what benefit is a mine of love burning where it
warms nobody, does nothing but blister the soul within
with its imprisoned heat? Love repressed grows
morbid, acts in a thousand perverse ways. These three
women, I'll venture to say, are living in the family
here like three frozen islands, knowing as little of each
other's inner life as if parted by eternal bamers of ice,
— and all because a cursed principle in the heart of the
mother has made her bring them up in violence to
nature."

" Well," said Emmy, " sometimes I do pity Jane ;
she is nearest my age ; and, naturally, I think she was
something like me, or might have been. The other day
I remember her coming in looking so flushed and ill
that I couldn't help asking if she were unwell. The
tears came into her eyes ; but her mother looked up,

EEPKESSION. 77

in lier cool, business-like way, and said, in her diy
voice, —

*' ' Jane, what's the matter?'

" ' Oh, my head aches dreadfully, and I have pains in
■ all my limbs !'

*' I wanted to jump and run to do something for her
— you know at our house we feel that a sick person
must be waited on ; but her mother only said, in the
same dry way, —

" ' Well, Jane, j^ou've probably got a cold ; go into
the kitchen and make yourself some good boneset tea,
soak your feet in hot water and go to bed at once ;' and
Jane meekly departed.

" I wanted to spring and do these things for her ; but
it's curious, in this house I never dare offer to do any-
thing ; and mother looked at me as she went out, with a
significant nod, —

" ' That's always wy way ; if any of the children are
sick, I never coddle them ; it's best to teach them to
make as light of it as possible.' "

"Dreadful!" said I.

"Yes, it is dreadful," said Emmy, drawing her
breath, as if relieved that she might speak her mind ;
" it's dreadful to see these people, who I know love
each other, living side by side and never saying a
loving, tender word, never doing a little loving thing,
— sick ones crawling off alone like sick animals, per-
sisting in being alone, bearing everything alone. But
I won't let them ; I will insist on forcing my way into
their rooms. I would go and sit with Jane, and pet her,

78 LITTLE FOXES.

and hold her hand and bathe her head, though I knew
it made her horribly uncomfortable at first ; but I
thought she ought to learn to be petted in a Christian
way when she was sick. I will kiss her, too, some-
times ; though she takes it just like a cat that isn't used
to being stroked, and calls me a silly girl ; but I know
she is getting to like it. What is the use of people's
loving each other in this horridly cold, stingy, silent
wa}'' ? If one of them were dangerously ill now, or
met with any serious accident, I know there would be
no end to what the others would do for her ; if one of
them were to die, the others would be perfectly crushed ;
but it would all go inward, — drop silently down into
that dark, cold, frozen well ; they couldn't speak to each
other ; they couldn't comfort each other ; they have lost
the power of expression ; they absolutely canH."

" Yes," said I, " they are like the fakirs who have
held up an arm till it has become stiffened, — they can-
not now change its position ; like the poor mutes, who,
being deaf, have become dumb through disuse of the
organs of speech. Their education has been like those
iron suits of armour into which little boys were put
in the middle ages, solid, inflexible, put on in child-
hood, enlarged with every j-ear's growth, till the warm
human frame fitted the mould as if it had been melted
and poured into it. A person educated in this waj' is
hopelessly crippled, never will be what he might have
been."

"Oh, don't say that, Chris; think of John; think
how good he is !"

REPRESSION. 79

" I do think how good lie is," — with indignation, —
"and how few know it, too. I think that, with the
tenderest, truest, gentlest heart, the utmost appreciation
of human friendship, he has passed in the workl for
a cold, proud, selfish man. If your frank, impulsive,
incisive nature had not unlocked gates and opened
doors, he would never have known the love of woman ;
and now he is but half disenchanted; he every day
tends to go back to stone."

" But I shan't let him ; oh, indeed, I know the
danger ! I shall bring him out. I shall work on them
all. I know they are beginning to love me a good deal ;
in the first place, because I belong to John, and every-
thing belonging to him is perfect ; and in the second
place, "

" In the second place, because they expect to weave,
day after day, the fine cobweb lines of their cold system
of repression around you, which will harden and harden,
and tighten and tighten, till you are as stiff and
shrouded as any of them. You remind me of our poor
little duck: don't you remember him?"

" Yes, poor fellow ! how he would stay out, and swim
round and round, while the pond kept freezing and
freezing, and his swimming-place grew smaller and
smaller every day ; but he was such a plucky little
fellow that "

" That at last we found him one mornins: frozen tight
in, and he has limped ever since on his poor feet."

" Oh, but I won't freeze in," she said, laughing.

" Take care, Emmy ! You are sensitive, approbative,

80 LITTLE FOXES. '

delicately organized ; your whole nature inclines yon to
give Avay and yield to the nature of those around yon.
One little lone duck such as you, however warm-blooded,
light-hearted, cannot keep a whole pond from freezing.
"While you have any influence, j^ou must use it all to
get John away from these surroundings, where you can
have him to yourself."

*' Oh, 3'ou know we are building our house ; we shall
go to housekeeping soon."

"AVhere? Close by, under the very guns of this
fortress, where all your housekeeping, all your little
management, will be subject to daily inspection."

" But mamma never interferes, never advises, — unless
I ask advice."

'*No, but she influences; she lives, she looks, she is
there ; and while she is there, and while j'our home is
within a stone's throw, the old spell will be on your
husband, on your children, if you have any ; you will
feel it in the air ; it will constrain, it Avill sway you, it
will rule j'our house, it will bring up your children."

" Oh, no ! never ! never ! I never could ! I never
will ! If God should give me a dear little child, I will
not let it grow up in these hateful ways !"

" Then, Emmy, there will be a constant, still, un-
defined, but real friction of your life-poAver, from the
silent grating of your' wishes and feelings on the cold,
positive millstone of their opinion ; it will be a life-
battle with a quiet, invisible, pervading spirit, who will
never show himself in fair fight, but who will be around
you in the verj'air you breathe, at your pillow when 3'ou

IlEPRESSION. 81

lie down and when you rise. There is so much in these
friends of 3-ours noble, wise, severely good, — their aims
are so high, their efficacy so great, their virtues so
manj^ — that they will act upon you with the force of a
conscience, subduing, drawing, insensibly constraining
you into their moulds. They have stronger wills,
stronger natures than yours ; and between the two
forces of your own nature and theirs you will be always
oscillating, so that you will never show what you can
do, working either in your own way or yet in theirs :
your life will be a failure."

" Oh, Chris, why do you discourage me ?"
" I am trying tonic treatment, Emily ; I am showing
you a real danger ; I am rousing you to flee from it.
John is making money fast ; there is no reason why he
should always remain buried in this town. Use your
influence as they do, — daily, hourly, constantly, — to
predispose him to take you to another sphere. Do not
always shrink and yield ; do not conceal and assimilate
and endeavour to persuade him and yourself that you
are happy ; do not put the very best face to him on it
all ; do not tolerate his relapses daily and hourly into
his habitual, cold, inexpressive manner; and don't lay
aside your own little impulsive, outspoken ways.
Eespect your own nature, and assert it ; woo him, argue
with him ; use all a woman's weapons to keep him from
falling back into the old Castle Doubting where he lived
till 3^ou let him out. Dispute your mother's hateful
dogma, that love is to be taken for granted without
daily proof between lovers ; cry down latent caloric in

82 LITTLE FOXES.

■the market ; insist that the mere fact of being a wife is
not enough, — that the -words spoken once, years ago,
are not enough, — that love, needs new leaves every
summer of life, as much as your elm-trees, and new
branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers
at the root to cover the ground."

" Oh, but I have heard that there is no surer way to
lose love than to be exacting, and that it never comes
for a woman's reproaches/'

*' All true as gospel, Emmy. I am not speaking of
reproaches, or of unreasonable self-assertion, or of ill-
temper, — 3'ou could not use any of these forces if you
would, you poor little chick ! I am speaking now of the
highest dut}^ we owe our friends, the noblest, the most
sacred, — that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness,
pure and incorrupt. Thoughtless, instinctive, unreason-
ing love and self-sacrifice, such as many women long to
bestow on Imsband and children, soil and lower the very
objects of their love. Tou may grow saintly by self-
sacrifice ; but do your husband and children grow
saintly by accepting it without return ? I have seen a
verse which says, —

* They -who kneel at woman's shrine
Breathe on it as they bow.'

Is not this true of all unreasoning love and self-devo-
tion ? If we let our friend become cold and selfish and
exacting without a remonstrance, we are no true lover —
no true friend. Any good man soon learns to dis-
criminate between the remonstrance that comes from a

KEPRESSION. 83

woman's love to liis soul, her concern for his honour,
her anxiety for his moral development, and the pettish
cry which comes from her own personal wants. It will
be your own fault if, for lack of anything you can do,
your husband relapses into these cold, undemonstrative
habits which have robbed his life of so much beauty
and enjojnnent. These dead, barren ways of living are
as unchristian as they are disagreeable ; and you, as a
good little Christian sworn to fight heroically under
Christ's banner, must make headway against this sort of
family Antichrist, though it comes with a show of su-
perior sanctity and self-sacrifice. Eemember, dear, that
the Master's family had its outward tokens of love as
well as its inward life. The beloved leaned on His
bosom ; and the traitor could not have had a sign for
his treachery had there not been a daily kiss at meeting
and parting with His children."

" I am glad you have said all this," said Emily,
" because now I feel stronger for it. It does not now
seem so selfish for me to want what it is better for John
to give. Yes, I must seek what will be best for him."

And so the little one, put on the track of self-sacrifice,
began to see her way clearer, as many little women of
her sort do. Make them look on self-assertion as one
form of martyrdom, and they will come into it.

But, for all my eloquence on this evening, the house
was built in tho self-same spot as projected ; and the
family life went on, under the shadow of Judge Evans's
elms, much as if I had not spoken. Emmy became
mother of two fine, lovely boys, and waxed dimmer and

84 LITTLE FOXES.

fainter ; while with her physical decay came increasing
need of the rule in Ihe household of mamma and sisters,
w^ho took her up energetically on eagles' wings, and
kept her house, and managed her children ; for what
can be done when a woman hovers half her time be-
tween life and death?

At last I spoke out to John, that the climate and
atmosphere were too severe for her who had become so
dear to him, — to them all ; and then they consented
that the change much talked of and urged, but always
opposed by the parents, should be made.

John bought a pretty cottage in our neighbourhood,
and brought his wife and boys ; and the effect of change
of moral atmosphere verified all my predictions. In a
year we had our own blooming, jo3'ous, impulsive little
Emily once more, — full of life, full of cheer, full of
energy, — looking to the ways of her household, — the
merry companionship of her growing boys, — the blithe
empress over her husband, who took to her genial sway
as in the old happy days of courtship. The nightmare
was past, and John was as joyous as any of us in his
freedom. As Emmy said, he was turned right side out
for life ; and we all admired the pattern. And that is
the end of my story.

And now for the moral, — and that is, that life consists
of two parts, — Expression and J-lepression, — each of which
has its solemn duties. To love, joy, hope, faith, pity,
belongs the duty of expression : to anger, envy, malice,
revenge, and all uncharitableness belongs the duty of
repression.

REPRESSION. 85

Some very religious and moral people err by ap-
plying repression to both classes alike. They repress
equally the expression of love and of hatred, of pity
and of anger. Such forget one great law, as true in
the moral world as in the physical, — that repression
lessens and deadens. Twice or thrice mowing will
kill off the sturdiest crop of weeds ; the roots die
for want of expression. A compress on a limb will
stop its growing; the surgeon knows this, and puts
a tight bandage around a tumour ; but what if we
put a tight bandage about the heart and lungs, as
some young ladies of my acquaintance do, — or bandage
the feet, as they do in China ? And what if we
bandage a nobler inner faculty, and wrap love in grave-
clothes ?

But, again, there are others, and their number is
legion, — perhaps you and I, reader, may know some-
thing of it in ourselves, — who have an instinctive habit
of repression in regard to all that is noblest and highest
within them, which they do not feel in their lower and
more unworthy nature.

It comes far easier to scold our friend, in an angry
moment, than to say how much we love, honour, and
esteem him, in a kindly mood. Wrath and bitterness
speak themselves and go with their own force ; love is
shame-faced, looks shyly out of the window, lingers
long at the door-latch.

How much freer utterance among many good Christians
have anger, contempt, and censoriousness, than tender-
ness and love ! 1 hate is said loud, and with all our

86 LITTLE FOXES.

force : 1 love is said with a hesitating voice and blush-
ing cheek.

In an angry mood we do an injuiy to a loving heart
with good, strong, free emphasis ; but we stammer and
hang back when our diviner nature tells us to confess
and ask pardon. Even when our heart is broken with
repentance, we haggle and linger long before we can

" Throw away tlie worser part of it."

How many live a stingy and niggardly life in regard
to their richest inward treasures ! They live with
those they love dearly, whom a few more words and
deeds expressive of this love would make so much
happier, richer, and better ; and they cannot, will not,
turn the key and give it out. People who in their very
souls really do love, esteem, reverence, almost worship
each other, live a barren, chilly life side by side, busy,
anxious, preoccupied, letting their love go hy as a
matter of course, a last year's growth, with no present
buds and blossoms.

Are there not sons and daughters who have parents
living with them as angels unawares, — husbands and
wives, brothers and sisters in whom the material for
a beautiful life lies locked awa}^ in unfruitful silence,
— who give time to everything but the cultivation and
expression of mutual love ?

The time is cuming, they think, in some far future,
when they shall find leisure to enjoy each other, to stop
and rest side by side, to discover to each other these
hidden treasures which lie idle and unused.

REPRESSION. 87

Alas ! time flies and death steals on, and we reiterate
tlie complaint of one in Scripture,— " It came to pass,
while thj servant was bus}^ hither and thither, the man
was gone."

The bitterest tears shed over gi^aves are for words left
unsaid and deeds left undone. " She never knew how
I loved her !" " He never knew what he was to me !"
" I always meant to make more of our friendship !" " I
did not know what he was to me till he was gone !"
Such words are the poisoned arrows which cruel Death
shoots backward at us from the door of the sepulchre.

How much more we might make of our family life, of
our friendships, if every secret thought of love blos-
somed into a deed ! We are not now speaking merely
of personal caresses. These may or may not be the
best language of affection. Many are endowed with
a delicacy, a fastidiousness of ph3^sical organization,
which shrinks away from too much of these, repelled
and overpowered. But there are words and looks and
little observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little
attentions, which make it manifest, and there is scarce
a family that might not be richer in heart- wealth for
more of them.

It is a mistake to suppose that relations must of
course love each other because they are relations. Love
must be cultivated, and can be increased by judicious
culture, as wild-fruits may double their bearing under
the hand of a gardener ; and love can dwindle and die
out by neglect, as choice flower-seeds planted in poor
«oil dwindle and grow single.

88 LITTLE FOXES.

Two causes in our Anglo-Saxon nature prevent this
easy faculty and flow of expression which strike one so
pleasantly in the Italian or the French life : the dread
of flattery, and a constitutional shyness.

" I perfectl}' longed to tell So-and-so how I admired
her, the other day," says Miss X.

" And why in the world didn't you tell her ?"

" Oh, it would seem like flattery, you know." ^^

Now what is flattery ?

Flattery is insincere praise, given from interested
motives, not the sincere utterance of a friend of what
we deem good and lovely in him.

And so, for fear of flattering, these dreadfully sincere
people go on side by side with those they love and
admire, giving them, all the time, the impression of
utter indiiference. Parents are so afraid of exciting
pride and vanity in their children by the expression
of their love and approbation, that a child sometimes
goes sad and discouraged by their side, and learns witli
surprise, in some chance way, that they are proud and
fond of him. There are times when the open expression
of a father's love would be worth more than church or
sermon to a boy ; and his father cannot utter it, — will
not show it.

The other thing that represses the utterances of love,
is the characteristic sht/ne.ss of the Anglo-Saxon blood.
Oddly enough, a race born of two demonstrative, out-
spoken nations — the German and the French — has an
habitual reserve that is like neither. There is a power-
lessness of utterance in our blood that we should fight

EEPEESSION. 89

against, and struggle outward towards expression. We
can educate ourselves to it, if w^e know and feel the
necessity; we can make it a Christian duty, not only
to love, but to be loving, — not only to be true friends,
but to show ourselves friendly. We can make ourselves
say the kind things that rise in our hearts and tremble
on our lips, — do the gentle and helpful deeds which
we long to do and shrink back from ; and, little
by little, it will grow easier, — the love spoken will
bring back the answer of love, — the kind deed will
bring back a kind deed in return,— till the hearts in
the family circle, instead of being so many frozen, icy
islands, shall be full of warm airs and echoing bird-
voices, answering back and forth with a constant melody
of love.

90 LITTLE FOXES.

IV.

SELF-WILL.

MY little foxes are interesting little beasts ; and I
only hope my reader will not get tired of my
charming menagerie, before I have done showing him
their nice points. He must recollect there are seven of
them, and as yet we have shown up only three ; so let
him have patience.

As before stated, little foxes are the little pet sins of
us educated, good Christians, who hope that we have got
above and far out of sight of stealing, lying, and those
other gross evils against which we pray every Sunday,
when the Ten Commandments are read. They are not
generally considered of dignity enough to be fired at
from the pulpit; they seem to us too trifling to be
remembered in church ; they are like the red spiders on
plants, — too small for the perception of the naked eye,
and only to be known by the shrivelling and dropping
of leaf after leaf that ought to be green and flourishing.

1 have another little fox in my eye, who is most active
and most mischievous in despoiling the vines of domestic
happiness, — in fiict, who has been guilty of destroying
more grapes than an^^body knows of. His name I find
it difficult to give with exactness. In my enumeration
I called him Self- Will; another name for him — perhaps
a better one — might be Persistence,

SELF-WILL. 9i

Like many another, this fault is the overactiun of a
most necessary and praiseworthy quality. 'J'he power
of firmness is given to man as the very granite founda-
tion of life. AV'ithout it, there would be nothing accom-
plished; all human plans would be unstable as water
on an inclined plane. In every well-constituted nature
there must be a power of tenacity, a gift of perseverance
of will ; and that man might not be without a founda-
tion for so needful a property, the Creator has laid it in
an animal faculty, which he possesses in common with
the brutes.

The animal power of firmness is a brute force, a
matter of brain and spinal cord, differing in different
animals. The force by which a bulldog holds on to an
antagonist, the persistence with which a mule will plant
his four feet and set himself against blows and menaces,
are good examples of the purely animal phase of a pro-
perty which exists in human beings, and forms the
foundation for that heroic endurance, for that perse-
verance, which carries on all the great and noble enter-
prises of life.

The domestic fault we speak of is the wild, un-
cultured growth of this faculty, the instinctive action
of firmness uncontrolled by reason or conscience, — in
common parlance, the being " set in onts way.'" It is
the animal instinct of being " set in one's way " which
we mean by self-will or persistence ; and in domestic
life it does the more mischief from its working as an
instinct, unwatched by reason and unchallenged by
conscience.

92 LITTLE FOXES.

In that pretty new cottage which you see on yoncler
knoll aie a pair of young people just in the midst of
that happy bustle which attends the formation of a
first home in -prosperous circumstances, and with all
the means of makin<>; it charmino; and agreeable. Car-
penters, upholsterers, and artificers await their will ;
and there remains for them only the pleasant task of
arranging and determining where all their pretty and
agreeable things shall be placed. Our Hero and Leander
are decidedly nice people, who have been through all
the proper stages of being in love with each other for
the requisite and suitable time. Tiiey have written
each other a letter every day for two years, beginning
witli "My dearest," and ending with "Your own," &c.;
they have sent each other flowers and rings and locks
of hair ; they have worn each other's pictures on their
hearts; they have spent hours and hours talking over
all subjects under the sun, and are convinced that never
was there such sympath}^ of souls, such unanimity of
opinion, such a just, reasonable, perfect foundation for
mutual esteem.

Now it is quite tnie that people may have a perfect
agreement and sympathy in their higher intellectual
nature, — may like the same books, quote the same
poetry, agree in the same principles, be united in the
same religion, — and nevertheless, when they come
together in the simplest affair of every-day business,
may find themselves jarring and impinging upon each
other at every step, simply because they are to each
person, in resjiect of daily personal habits and personal

SELF-WILL. 93

likes and dislikes, a thousand little individualities witli
which reason has nothing to do, which are not subjects
for the use of logic, and to which ^they never think of
applying the power of religion, — which can only be
set down as the positive ultimate facts of existence
with two people.

Suppose a blue jay courts and wins and weds a
Baltimore oriole. During courtship there may have
been delightfully sympathetic conversation on the
charm of being free birds, the felicity of soaring in
the bbie summer air. Mr. Jay may have been all
humility and all ecstasy in comparing the discordant
screech of his own note with the warbling tenderness
of Miss Oriole. But, once united, the two commence
business relations. He is firmly convinced that a hole
in a hollow tree is the only reasonable nest for a bird ;
she is positive that she should die there in a month of
damp and rheumatism. She never heard of going to
housekeeping in anything but a nice little pendulous
bag, swinging down from under the branches of a breezy-
elm ; he is sure he should have water on the brain
before summer was over, from constant vertigo, in such
swaying, unsteady quarters, — he would be a sea-sick
blue jay on land, and he cannot think of it. She knows
now he don't love her, or he never would think of
shutting her up in an old mouldy hole picked out of
rotten wood ; and he knows she doesn't love him, or she
never would want to make him uncomfortable all his
days, by tilting and swinging him about as no decent
bird ought to be swung. Both are dead-set in their

94 LITTLE FOXES.

o"vvn wa}' and opinion ; and Low is eitlicr to be con-
vinced that the way wliich seemeth right unto the
other is not best? Nature knows this, and therefore,
in her feathered tribes, blue jays do not mate with
orioles : and so bird-housekeeping goes on in j^eace.

But men and women as diverse in their physical
tastes and habits as blue jays and orioles are wooing
and wedding every da}^ and coming to the business
of nest-building, alias housekeeping, with predilections
as violent, and as incapable of any logical defence, as
the oriole's partiality for a swing-nest and the jay's
preference of rotten wood.

Our Hero and Leander, then, who are arranging
their cottage to-day, are examples just in point. The}''
have both of them been only children; — both the idols
of circles where they have been universally deferred
to. Each in his or her own circle has been looked up
to as a model of good taste, and of course each has the
habit of exercising and indulging very distinct personal
tastes. They truly, deeply esteem, respect, and love
each other, and for the very best of reasons, — because
there are sympathies of the very highest kind between
them. Both are generous and afiectionate, — both are
higldy cultu]-ed in intellect and taste, — both are earnestl}^
religious ; and yet, Avith all this, let me tell you that
the first year of their married life will be worthy to be
recorded as a year of lattles. Yes, these friends so true,
these lovers so ardent, these individuals in themselves
so admirable, cannot come into the intimate relations
ot life without an effervescence as great as that of an

SELF-WILL. 95

acid and alkali ; and it T%'ill be impossible to decide
which is most in fault, the acid or the alkali, both being
in their way of the very best quality.

The reason of it all is, that both are intensely ''set
in their uay^'' and the ways of no two human beings are
altogether coincident. Both of them have the most
sharply defined, exact tastes and preferences. In the
simplest matter both have a xmy, — an exact way, — ■
which seems to be dear to them as life's blood. In the
simplest appetite or taste they know exactly what they
want, and cannot, by any argument, persuasion, or
coaxing, be made to want anything else.

For example, this morning dawns bright upon them,
as she, in her tidy morning wrapper and trimly-laced
boots, comes stepping over the bales and boxes which
are discharged on the verandah ; while he, for joy of
his ne^y acquisition, can hardly let her v/alk on her
own pretty feet, and is making every fond excuse to
lift her over obstacles and carry her into her new
dwelling in triumph.

Carpets are put down, the floors glow under the
hands of obedient workmen, and now the furniture is
being wheeled in.

" Put the piano in the bow- window," says the lady.

" No, not in the bow- window," says the gentleman.

" Why, my dear, of course it must go in the bow-
window. How awkward it would look anywhere else !
I have always seen pianos in bow- windows."

" My love, certainly you would not think of dashing
that beautiful prospect from the bow-window by block-

96 LITTLE FOXES.

ing it up with the piano. The proper place is just
here, in the corner of the room. !Now try it."

*' M}' dear, I think it looks dreadfully there; it spoils
the appearance of the room."

'* \\ ell, for my part, my love, I think the appearance
of the room would be spoiled if you filled up the bow-
window. Think what a lovely place that would be to
sit in !"

"Just as if we couldn't sit there behind the piano,
if we wanted to !" says the ladj^

" But then, how much more ample and airy the room
looks as you open the door, and see through the bow-
window down that little glen, and that distant peep of
the village-spire !"

" But I never could be reconciled to the piano stand-
ing in the corner in that way," says the lady. " / insist
upon it, it ought to stand in the bow-window : it's
the way mamma's stands, and Aunt Jane's, and Mrs.
"Wilcox's ; everybod}' has their piano so."

"If it comes to insisting" says the gentleman, " it
strikes me that is a game two can play at."

" Why, my dear, you know a lady's parlour is her
own ground."

" Not a married ladj^'s parlour, I imagine. I believe
it is at least equally her husband's, as he expects to pass
a good portion of his time there."

" But I don't think you ought to insist on an ar-
rangement that really is disagreeable to me," says the
lady.

" And I don't think you ought to insist on an arrange-

SELF-WILL. 97

ment that is really disagreeable to me," says the
gentleman.

And now Hero's cheeks flush, and the spirit burns
within, as she says, —

" Well, if you insist upon it, I su2:)pose it must be as
you say ; but I shall never take any pleasure in playing
on it;" and Hero sweeps from the apartment, leaving
the victor very unhappy in his conquest.

He rushes after her, and finds her up-stairs, sitting
disconsolate and weeping on a packing-box.

" Now, Hero, how silly ! Do have it your own way.
I'll give it up."

" No, — let it be as 3"ou say. I forgot that it was a
wife's duty to submit."

*' Nonsense, Hero ! Do talk like a rational woman.
Don't let us quarrel like children."

" But it 's so evident that I was in the right."

*' My dear, I cannot concede that you were in the
right ; but I am willing it should be as you say."

" Now, I perfectly wonder, Leander, that you don't
see how awkward your way is. It would make me
nervous every time I came into the room, and it
would be so dark in that corner that I never could
see the notes."

" And I wonder, Hero, that a woman of your taste
don't see how shutting up that bow-windoAv spoils
the parlour. It's the very prettiest feature of the
room."

And so round and round they go, stating and re-
stating their arguments, both getting more and more

98 LITTLE FOXES.

nervous and combative, both declaring themselves per-
fectly ready to yield the point as an oppressive exac-
tion, but to do battle for their own opinion as right
and reason, — the animal instinct of self-will meanwhile
rising and rising and growing stronger and stronger
on both sides. But meanwhile in the heat of argu-
ment some side-issues and personal reflections fly out
like splinters in the shivering of lances. He tells her,
in his heat, that her notions are formed from deference
to models in fashionable life, and that she has no idea
of adaptation, — and she tells him that he is domineer-
ing and dictatorial, and wanting to have everything
his own way ; and in fine, this battle is fought off and
on through the day, with occasional armistices of
kisses and makings-up, — treacherous truces, which are
all broken up by the fatal words, " My dear, after all,
you must admit / was in the right," which, of course,
is the signal to fight the whole battle over again.

One such prolonged struggle is the jDarent of many
lesser ones, — the aforenamed splinters of injurious re-
mark and accusation which flew out in the heat of argu-
ment, remaining and festering and giving rise to nervous
soreness ; yet, where there is at the foundation real,
genuine love, and a good deal of it, the pleasure of
making up so balances the pain of the controversy, that
the two do not perceive exactly what they are doing,
nor suspect that so deep and wide a love as theirs can
be seriously affected by causes so insignificant.

But the cause of difliculty in both, the silent, un-
watched, intense power of self-will in trifles, is all the

SELF-WILL. 99

while precipitating them into new encounters. For
example, in a bright hour between the showers, Hero
arranges for her Leander a repast of peace and good-
will, and compounds for him a salad which is a chef-
cfceuvre among salads. Leander is also bright and pro-
pitious ; but after tasting the salad, he pushes it silently
away,

" My dear, you don't like your salad."

" No, my dear ; 1 never eat anything with salad oil
in it."

"Not eat salad oil? How absurd! I never heard
of a salad without oil." And the lady looks dis
turbed.

" But, my dear, as I tell you, I never take it. I
prefer simple sugar and vinegar."

" Sugar and vinegar ! Why, Leander, I'm astonished !
How very bourgeois 1 You must really try to like my
salad " — (spoken in a coaxing tone).

" My dear, I never try to like anything new. I am
satisfied with my old tastes."

" Well, Leander, I must say that is very ungracious
and disobliging of you."

" Why any more than for you to annoy me by forcing
on me what I don't like ?"

** But you would like it, if you would only try
People never like olives till they have eaten three or
four, and then they become passionately fond of them."

" Then I think they are very silly to go through all
that trouble, when there are enough things that they
do like."

100 LITTLE FOXES.

" Now, Leander, I don't think that eeems amia-
blo or pleasant 'at all. I think we ought to try
and accommodate ourselves to the tastes of our
friends."

" Then, my dear, suppose you try to like your salad
with sugar and vinegar."

" But it 's so gauche and unfashionahle ! Did you
ever hear of a salad made with sugar and vinegar on a
table in good society ?"

" My mother's table, I believe, was in good society,
and I learned to like it there. The truth is. Hero, for a
sensible woman, you are too fond of mere fashionable
and society notions."

" Yes, you told me that last week, and I think it
was very unjust, — very unjust, indeed" — (uttered with
emphasis).

" No more unjust than your telling me that I was
dictatorial and obstinate."

" Well, now, Leander, dear, you must confess that
you are rather obstinate."

" I don't see the proof."

" You insist on your own ways so, heaven and earth
can't turn you."

" Do I insist on mine more than you on yours?"

" Certainly, you do."

" I don't think so."

Hero casts up her eyes and repeats with expres-
sion, —

" Oh, wad tiomc power the giftie gie U8
To see oursela as ethers see us !'

SELF-WILL. 101

" Precisely," says Leander. *' I would that prayer
were answered in your case, my dear."

" I think you take pleasure in provoking me," says
the lady.

"My dear, how silly and childish all this is!" says
the gentleman. " Why can't we let each other alone ?"

** You began it."

*' No, my dear, begging your pardon, I did not."

" Certainly, Leander, you did."

Kow a conversation of this kind may go on hour
after hour, as long as the respective parties have breath
and strength, both becoming secretly more and more
*' set in their way." On both sides is the consciousness
that they might end it at] once by a very simple con-
cession.

She might say, — " Well, dear, you shall always have
3'^our salad as j'ou like;" and he might say, — " My dear,
I will try to like your salad, if you care much about
it;" and if either of them would utter one of these
sentences, the other would soon follow. Either would
give up if the other would set the example ; but as it
is, they remind us of nothing so much as two cows that
we have seen standing, with locked horns, in a meadow,
who can neither advance nor recede an inch. It is a
mere dead-lock of the animal instinct of firmness ; rea-
son, conscience, religion have nothing to do with it.

The questions debated in this style by our young
couple were surprisingly numerous : as, for example,
whether their favourite copy of Turner should hang in
the parlour or in the library, — whether their pet little

102 LITTLE FOXES.

landscape slioukl hang against the wall, or be placed on
an easel, — whether the bust of Psyche should stand on
the marble table in the hall, or on a bracket in the
library ; all of which points were debated with a
breadth of survey, a richness of imagery, a vigour of
discussion, that would be perfectly astonishing to any
one who did not know how much two self-willed, argu-
mentative people might find to say on any point under
heaven. Everything in classical antiquity, eveiything
in Kugler's " Iland-Book of Painting," — every opinion
of living artists, — besides questions social, moral, and
religious, — all mingled in the grand melee : because
there is nothing in creation that is not somehow con-
nected with everything else.

Dr. Johnson has said, — " There are a thousand
familiar disputes which reason never can decide ; ques-
tions that elude investigation, and make logic ridicu-
lous ; cases where something must be done, and where
little can be said."

With all deference to the great moralist, we must say
that this statement argues a veiy limited knowledge of
the resoiirces of talk possessed by two very cultivated
and very self-willed persons, fairly pitted against each
other in practical questions ; the logic may indeed be
ridiculous, but such people as our Hero and Leander
find no cases under the sun where something is to be
done, yet where little can be said. And these wretched
wranglings, this interminable labyrinth of petty dis-
putes, waste and crumble away that high ideal of truth
and tenderness, wliich the real, deep sympathies and

SELF-WILL. 103

actual wortli of their characters entitled them to form.
Their married life is not what they expected ; at times
they are startled by the reflection that they have some-
how grown unlovel}' to each other ; and yet, if Leander
goes away to pass a w^eek, and thinks of his Hero in the
distance, he can compare no other woman to her ; and
the days seem long and the house empty to Hero while
he is gone ; both wonder at themselves when they look
over their petty bickerings, but neither knows exactly
how to catch the little fox that spoils their vines.

It is astonishing how much we think about ourselves,
yet to how little purj^ose, — how very clever people will
talk and wonder about themselves and each other, and
yet go on year after year, not knowing how to use
either themselves or each other, — not having as much
practical philosophy in the matter of their own charac-
ters and that of their friends, as they have in respect of
the screws of their gas-fixtures or the management of
their water-pipes.

" But 1 won't have any such scenes with my wife,"
says Don Positive. " I won't marry one of your clever
women; they are always positive and disagreeable.
I look for a wife of a gentle and yielding nature, that
shall take her opinions from me, and accommodate her
tastes to mine." And so Don Positive goes and marries
a pretty little pink-and- white concern, so lisping and
soft and delicate that he is quite sure she cannot have a
will of her own. She is the moon of his heavens, to
shine only by his reflected light.

AVe would advise our gentlemen friends who wish to

104 LITTLE FOXES.

enjoy tlio felicity of having their own way not to try
the experiment with a pretty fool ; for the obstinacy of
clevemess and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of
folly and inanity.

Let our friend once get in the seat opposite to him at
table a pretty creature Avho cries for the moon, and
insists that he don't love her because he doesn't get it
for her ; and in vain may he display his superior know-
ledge of astronomy, and prove to her that the moon is
not to be got. She listens with her head on one side,
and after he has talked himself quite out of breath,
repeats the very same sentence she began the discussion
with, without variation or addition.

If she wants darling Johnny taken away from school,
because cruel teachers will not give up the rules of the
institution fur his pleasure, in vain does Don Positive,
in the most select and superior English, enlighten her
on the necessity of habits of self-control and order for a
boy, — the impossibility that a teacher should make
exceptions for their particular darling, — the absolute,
perishing need that the boy should begin to do some-
thing. She hears him all through, and then saj's, " I
don't know anything about that. I know what I want :
I want Johnny taken away." And so she weeps, sulks,
Btoims, entreats, lies awake nights, has long fits of
sick-headache, — in short, shows that a pretty animal,
without reason or cultivation, can be, in her way,
quite as foimidable an antagonist as the most clever
of her sex.

Leander can sometimes vanquish his Hero in fair

SELF-WILL. 105

fight by the weapons of good logic, because she is a
woman capable of appreciating reason, and able to feel
the force of the considerations he adduces ; and when he
does vanquish and carry her captive by his bow and
spear, he feels that he has gained a victory over no
ignoble antagonist, and he becomes a hero in his own
e^^es. Though a woman of much will, still she is a
woman of much reason ; and if he has many vexations
with her pertinacity, he is never without hope in her
good sense ; but alas for him whose wife has only the
animal instinct of firmness, without any development of
the judgment or reasoning faculties ! The conflicts
with a woman whom a man respects and admires are
often extremely trying ; but the conflicts with one
whom he cannot help despising, become in the end
simply disgusting.

But the inquiry now arises, What shall be done with
all the questions Dr. Johnson speaks of, which reason
cannot decide, which elude investigation, and make
logic ridiculous, — cases where something must be done,
and where little can be said ?

Eead Mrs. Ellis's " Wives of England," and you have
one solution of the problem. The good women of
England are there informed that there is to be no
discussion, that everything in the menage is to follow
the rule of the lord, and that the wife has but one hope,
namely, that grace may be given him to know exactly
what his own will is. '' L'etat, cest moi," is the lesson
which every English husband learns of Mrs. Ellis, and
we should judge from the pictures of English novels

lOG LITTLE FOXES.

that this " awful right divine " is insisted on in detail
in domestic life.

Miss Edgeworth makes her magnificent General
Clarendon talk about his " commands " to his accom-
plished and elegant wife ; and he rings the parlour-bell
with such an air, calls up and interrogates trembling
servants with such awful majesty, and lays about him
generally in so very military and tremendous a style*
that we are not surprised that poor little Cecilia is
frightened into lying, being half out of her wits in
terror of so veiy martial a husband.

During his hours of courtship he majestically informs
her mother that he never could consent to receive as his
wife any woman who has had another attachment ; and
so the poor puss, like a nanghty girl, conceals a little
school-girl flirtation of bygone days, and thus gives rise
to most agonizing and tragic scenes with her terrible
lord, who petrifies her one morning b}'' suddenly draw-
ing the bed-curtains and flapping an old love-letter in
her eyeSy asking, in tones of suppressed thunder,
" Cecilia, is this your writing ?"

The more modem female novelists of England give us
representations of their^view of the right divine no less
stringent. In a very popular story, called "Agatha's
Husband," the plot is as follows. A man marries a
beautiful girl with a large fortune. Before the marriage,
he discovers that his brother, who has been guardian of
the estate, has fraudulently squandered the property, so
that it can only bo retrieved by the strictest economy.
For the sake of getting her heroine into a situation to

SELF-WILL. 107

illustrate her moral, the authoress now makes her hero
give a solemn promise not to divulge to his wife or ix)
any human being the fraud by which she suffers.

The plot of the story then proceeds to show how very
badly the young wife behaves when her husband takes
her to mean lodgings, deprives her of wonted luxuries
and comforts, and obstinately refuses to give any kind
of sensible reason for his conduct. Instead of looking
up to him with blind faith and unquestioning obedience,
following his directions without inquiry, and believing
not only without evidence, but against apparent evi-
dence, that he is the soul of honour and wisdom, this
perverse iVgatha murmurs, complains, thinks herself
very ill-used, and occasionally is even wicked enough,
in a very mild way, to say so, — whereat her husband
looks like a martyr and suffers in silence ; and thus we
are treated to a volume of mutual distresses, which are
at last ended by the truth coming out, the abused
husband mounting the throne in glory, and the penitent
wife falling in the dust at his feet, and confessing what
a wretch she has been all along to doubt him.

The authoress of " Jane Eyre " describes the process of
courtship in much the same terms as one would describe
the breaking of a horse. Shirley is contumacious and
self-willed, and Moore, her lover and tutor, gives her
" Le Cheval dompte" for a French lesson, as a gentle in-
timation of the work he has in hand in paying her his
addresses ; and after long struggling against his power,
when at last she consents to his love, he addresses her
thus, under the figure of a very fierce leopardess : —

108 LITTLE FOXES.

*' Tame or wild, fierce or subdued, you are mine."

And she resjionds : —

" I am glad I know my keeper and am used to him.
Only his voice will I follow, only his hand shall manage
me, only at his feet will I repose."

The accomplished authoress of *' Nathalie " represents
the struggles of a young girl engaged to a man far older
than herself, extremely dark and heroic, fond of be-
having in a very unaccountable manner, and declaring,
nevertheless, in very awful and mysterious tones, that
he has such a passion for being believed in, that if any
one of his friends, under the most suspicious circum-
stances, admits om doubt of his honour, all will be over
between them for ever.

After establishing his power over Nathalie fully, and
amusing himself quietly for a time with the contempla-
tion of her perplexities and anxieties, he at last unfolds
to her the mysterious counsels of his will by declaring
to another of her lovers, in hei^ presence, that he " has
the intention of asking this young lady to become his
wife." During the engagement, however, he contrives
to disturb her tranquillity by insisting prematurely on
the right divine of husbands, and, as she proves fractious,
announces to her that, much as he loves her, he sees no
prospect of future happiness in their imion, and that
they had better part.

The rest of the story describes the stniggles and
anguish of the two, who pass through a volume of dis-
tresses, he growing more cold, proud, severe, and mis-
anthropic than ever, all of which is supposed to bo the

SELF-WILL. 109

fault of nanglity Miss Nathalie, who might have made a
saint of him, could she only have found her highest
pleasure in letting him have his own way. Her con-
science distresses her ; it is all her fault ; at last, worn
out in the strife, she resolves to be a good girl, goes to
his library, finds him alone, and, in spite of an insulting
reception, humbles herself at his feet, gives up all her
naughty pride, begs to be allowed to wait on him as a
handmaid, and is rewarded by his graciously announcing,
that, since she will stay with him at all events, she may
stay as his wife ; and the story leaves her in the last
sentence sitting in what we are informed is the only true
place of happiness for a woman, at her husband's feet.

This is the solution which the most cultivated women
of England give of the domestic problem, according to
these fair interpreters of English ideas.

The British lion on his own domestic hearth, standing
in awful majesty with his back to the fire and his hands
under his coat-tails, caji be supposed to have no such
disreputable discussions as we have described ; since his
partner, as Miss Bronte says, has learned to know her
keeper, and her place at his feet, and can conceive no
happiness so great as hanging the picture and setting
the piano exactly as he likes.

Of course this will be met with a general shriek of
horror on the part of our fair republican friends, and an
equally general disclaimer on the part of our American
gentlemen, who, so far as we know, would be quite
embarrassed by the idea of assuming any such pro-
uounced position at the fireside.

110 LITTLE FOXES.

The genius of American institutions is not towards a
display of authority. All needed authority exists among
us, but exists silentl}^, with as little external manifesta-
tion as possible.

Our President is but a fellow-citizen, personally the
equal of other citizens. ^Ve obey him because we have
chosen him, and because we find it convenient, in re-
gulating our affairs, to have one final appeal and one
deciding voice.

The position in which the Bible and the Marriage
Service place the husband in the family amounts to no
more. He is the head of the family in all that relates to
its material interests, its legal relations, its honour and
standing in society ; and no true woman who respects
herself would any more hesitate to promise to yield to
him this position and the deference it implies, than an
officer of State to yield to the President. But because
the President is officially above Mr. Seward, it does not
follow that there can be nothing between them but
absolute command on the one part, and prostrate sub-
mission on the other; neither does it follow that the
superior claims in all respects to regulate the affairs and
conduct of the inferior. There are still wide spheres of
individual freedom, as there are in the case of husband
and wife ; aud no sensible man but would feel himself
ridiculous in entering another's proper sphere with the
voice of authority.

The inspired declai-ation, that *' the husband is the
head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the
Church," is certainly to be qualified by the evident

SELF-WILL. Ill

points of difference in the subjects spoken of. It
certainly does not mean that any man shall be invested
with the rights of omnipotence and omniscience, but
simply that in the family state he is the head and pro-
tector, even as the Saviour is in the Church. It is
merely the announcement of a great natural law of
society which obtains through all the tribes and races of
men, — a great and obvious fact of human existence.

The silly and senseless reaction against this idea in
some otherwise sensible women is, I think, owing to the
kind of extravagances and overstatements to which we
have alluded. It is as absurd to cavil at the word obey
in the marriage ceremony, as for a military officer to set
himself against the etiquette of the aimy, or a man to
refuse the freeman's oath.

Two young men every way on a footing of equality
and friendship may be one of them a battalion-com-
mander and the other a staff-officer. It would be alike
absurd for the one to take airs about not obeying a man
every way his equal, and for the other to assume airs of
lordly dictation out of the sphere of his military duties.
The mooting of the question of marital authority be-
tween two well-bred, well-educated Christian people of
the nineteenth century is no less absurd.

While the husband has a certain power confided to
him for the support and maintenance of the family, and
for the preservation of those relations which involve its
good name and well-being before the world, he has no
claim to an authoritative exertion of will in reference to
the little personal tastes and habits of the interior. He

112 LITTLE FOXES.

lias no divine right to require that everything shall be
arranged to please him, at the expense of his wife's
preferences and feelings, any more than if he were not
the head of the household. In a thousand indifferent
matters, which do not touch the credit and respectability
of the family, he is just as much bound, sometimes to
o-ive up his own will and way for the comfoi-t of his
wife as she is in certain other matters to submit to his
decisions. In a large number of cases the husband and
wife stand as equal human beings before God, and the
indulgence of unchecked and inconsiderate self-will on
either side is a sin.

It is my serioiis belief that writings such as we have
been considering do harm both to men and women, by
insensibly inspiring in the one an idea of a licensed pre-
rogative of selfishness and self-will, and in the other an
irrational and indiscreet servility.

Is it any benefit to a man to find in the wife of his
bosom the flatterer of his egotism, the acquiescent
victim of his little selfish exactions, to be nursed and
petted and cajoled in all his faults and fault-findings,
and to see everybody falling prostrate before his will in
the domestic circle? Is this the true way to make him
a manly and Christ-like man? It is my belief that
many so-called good wives have been accessory to
making their husbands very bad Christians.

However, then, the little questions of difference in
everyday life are to be disposed of between two indi-
viduals, it is in the worst possible taste and policy to
undertake to settle them by mere authority. All

SELF-WILL. 113

romance, all poetry, all beauty are over foiever with a
couple between whom the struggle of mere authority has
begun. No, there is noway out of diiBculties of this de-
scription but by the application, on both sides, of good
sense and religion to the little differences of life.

A little reflection will enable any person to detect in
himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the
unwatched instinct of self-will, and to establish over
himself a jealous guardianship.

Every man and every woman, in their self- training
and self-culture, should study the art of giving up with
a good grace. The charm of polite society is formed by
that sort of freedom and facility in all the members of a
circle which makes each one pliable to the influences of
the others, and sympathetic to slide into the moods and
tastes of others without a jar.

In courteous and polished circles there are no stiff
railroad-tracks, cutting straight through everything,
and grating harsh thunders all along their course, but
smooth, meandering streams, tranquilly bending hither
and thither to ever}'- undulation of the flowery banks.
What Inakes the charm of polite society would make no
less the charm of domestic life ; but it can come only by
watchfulness and self-discipline in each individual.

Some people have much more to struggle with in this
way than others. Nature has made them precise and
exact. They are punctilious in their hours, rigid in
their habits, pained by any deviation from regukir
rule.

Now Nature is always perversely ordering that men

114 LITTLE FOXES.

and women of just this disposition should become
desperately enamoured of their exact opposites. The
man of rules and formulas and hours has his heart
carried off by a gay, careless little chit, who never
knows the day of the month, tears up the newspaper,
loses the door-key, and makes curl-papers out of the last
bill ; or, per contra, our exact and precise little woman,
whose belongings are like the waxen cells of a bee,
gives her heart to some careless fellow, who enters her
sanctum in muddy boots, upsets all her little nice
household divinities whenever ho is going on a hunting
or fishing bout, and can see no manner of sense in the
discomposure she feels in the case.

What can such couples do, if they do not adopt the
compromises of reason and sense, — if each arms his or
her own peculiarities with the back force of persistent
self-will, and runs them over the territories of the
other ?

A sensible man and woman, finding themselves thus
placed, can govern themselves by a just philosophy, and,
instead of carrying on a life-battle, can modify their
own tastes and requirements, turn their eyes frofti traits
which do not suit them to those which do, resolving, at
all events, however reasonable be the taste or propensity
which they sacrifice, to give up all rather than have
domestic strife.

There is one form which persistency takes that is
peculiarly tiying: I mean that persistency of opinion
which deems it necessary to stop and raise an argument
in self-defence, on the slightest personal criticism.

SELF-WILL. 115

John tells liis wife that she is half an hour late
with her breakfast this morning, and she indignantly
denies it.

" But look at my watch !"

*' Your watch isn't right."

" I set it by railroad time."

" Well, that was a week ago ; that watch of yours
always gains."

*' No, my dear, you're mistaken."

" Indeed I'm not. Did I not hear you telling Mr.
B about it?"

"My dear, that was a year ago, — before I had it
cleaned."

" How can you say so, John? It was only a month
ago."

'* My dear, you are mistaken."

And so the contest goes on, each striving for the last
word.

This love of the last word has made more bitterness
in families, and spoiled more Christians than it is worth.
A thousand little differences of this kind would drop to
the ground if either party would let them drop. Sup-
pose John is mistaken in saying breakfast is late, —
suppose that fifty of the little criticisms which we make
on one another are well or ill-founded, are they worth a
discussion ? Are they worth ill-tempered words, such
as are almost sure to grow out of a discussion ? Are
they worth throwing away peace and love for? Are
they worth the destruction of the only fair ideal left on
earth, — a quiet, happy home ? Better let the most

116 LITTLE FOXES.

Tinjust statements pass in silence than risk one's temper
in a discussion npon them.

Discussions, assuming the form of warm arguments,
are never pleasant ingredients of domestic life — never
safe recreations between near friends. They are, gene-
rally speaking, mere unsuspected vents for self-will ; and
the cases are few where the}^ do anything more than to
make both parties more positive in their own way than
they were before.

A calm comparison of opposing views, a fair state-
ment of reasons on either side, may be valuable ; but
when warmth and heat and love of victory and pride of
opinion come in, good temper and good manners are too
apt to step out.

And now Christopher, having come to the end of his
subject, pauses for a sentence to close with. There are
a few lines of a poet that sum up so beautifully all he
has been saying that he may be pardoned for closing
with them : —

" Alas ! how hglit a canso may move
Dissension between hearts that luve ;
Hearts that the world lias vainly tried,
And sfjrrow but more closely tied ;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships that liave gone down at sea
AVhen heaven was all tranquillity !
A something light as air, a look,
A word unkind, or wrongly taken, —
Oh, love that t<.'mpests never shook,
A breath, a touch like this hath shaken!
For ruder words will troon rush in
To spread the breach that words begin,

SELF-WILL. 117

And eyes forget the gentle ray
They wore in courtship's smiling day,
And voices lose the tone which shed
A tenderness round all they said, —
Till, fast declining, one by one,
The sweetnesses of love are gone,
And hearts, so lately mingled, seem
Like broken clouds, or like the stream,
That, smiling, left the mountain-brow
As though its waters ne'er could sever,
Yet, ere it reaches the plain below,
Breaks iuto floods that part for ever."

lis LITTLE FOXES.

INTOLERANCE.

ii A ND what are you going to preacli about this
A month, Mr. Crowfield ?"

" I am going to give a sermon on Intolerance, Mrs.
Crowfield."

" Eeligious intolerance ?"

"No, — domestic and family and educational intoler-
ance, — one of the seven deadly sins on which I am
preaching, — one of ' the foxes.' "

People are apt to talk as if all the intolerance in
life were got up and expended in the religious world ;
whereas religious intolerance is only a small branch of
the radical, strong, all-pervading intolerance of human
nature.

Physicians are quite as intolerant as theologians.
They never have had the power of burning at the
stake for medical opinions, but they certainly have
shown the will. Politicians are intolerant. Philoso-
phers are intolerant, especially those who pique them-
selves on liberal opinions. Painters and sculptors are
intolerant. And housekeepers are intolerant, virulently
denunciatory concerning any departures from their par-
ticular domestic creed.

Mrs. Alexander Exact, seated at her domestic altar,

INTOLERANCE. 119

gives homilies on the degeneracy of modern house-
keeping equal to the lamentations of Dr. Holdfast as
to the falling off from the good old faith.

"Don't tell me about pillow-cases made without
felling," says Mrs. Alexander ; " it's slovenly and
shiftless. I wouldn't have such a pillow-case in my
house any more than I'd have vermin."

" But," says a trembling young housekeeper, conscious
of unfelled pillow-cases at home, " don't you think, Mrs.
Alexander, that some of these old traditions mig-ht be
dispensed with ? It really is not necessary to do all
the work that has been done so thoroughly and exactly,
— to double-stitch every wristband, fell every seam,
count all the threads of gathers, and take a stitch to
every gather. It makes beautiful sewing, to be sure ;
but when a woman has a family of little children
and a small income, if all her sewing is to be kept
up in this perfect style, she wears her life out in
stitching. Plad she not better slight a little, and get
air and exercise ?"

" Don't tell me about air and exercise ! What did
my grandmother do ? Why, she did all her own work
and made grandfather's ruffled shirts besides, with the
finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise
enough, I warrant you. Women of this day are
miserable, sickly, degenerate creatures."

" But, my dear Madam, look at poor Mrs. Evans, over
the way, with her pale face and her eight little ones."

"Miserable manager," said Mrs. Alexander. "If
she'd get up at five o'clock the year round, as I do,

120 LITTLE FOXES.

she'd find time enough to do things" properly, and be
the better for it."

" But, my dear Madam, Mrs. Evans is a very delicately
organized, nervous Avoman."

".Nervous ! Don't tell me ! Every woman now-a-
days is nervous. She can't get up in the morning,
because she's nervous. She can't do her sewing
decently, because she's nervous. Why, I might have
been as nervous as she is, if I'd have petted and coddled
myself as she does. But I get up early, take a w^alk in
the fi-esh air of a mile or so before breakfast, and come
home feeling the better for it. I do all my own se"VNdng,
— never put out a stitch ; and I flatter myself my
things are made as they ought to be. I always make
my boy's shirts and Mr. Exact's, and they are made as
shirts ought to be, — and yet I find plenty of time for
calling, shopping, business, and company. It only re-
quires management and resolution."

"It is perfectly wonderful, to be sure, Mrs. Exact,
to see all that you do; but don't you get very tired
sometimes ?"

** Xo, not often. I remember, though, the week
before last Christmas, I made and baked eighteen pies
and ten loaves of cake in one day, and I was really
quite worn out ; but I didn't give way to it. I told
Mr. Exact I thought it would rest me to take a
drive into New York and attend the Sanitary Fair,
and so we did. I sujipose Mrs. Evans w^ould have
thought she must go to bed and coddle herself for a
month."

INTOLERANCE. 121

*' But, dear Mrs. Exact, when a woman is kept awake
nights by crjdng babies "

" There's no need of having crying babies : my
babies never cried ; it's just as you begin with children.
I might have had to be up and down every hour of the
night with mine, just as Mrs. Evans is ; but I knew
better. I used to take 'em up about ten o'clock, and
feed and make 'em all comfortable; and that was the
last of 'em, till I was ready to get up in the morning.
I never lost a night's sleep with any of mine."

" Not when they were teething ?"

*'No. I knew how to manage that. I used to lance
their gums myself, and I never had any trouble : it's
all in management. I weaned 'em all myself, too :
there's no use in having any fuss in weaning children."

"Mrs. Exact, you are a wonderful manager; but it
would be impossible to bring up all babies so."

" You'll never make me believe that : people only
need to begin right. I'm sure I've had a trial of
eight."

*' But there's that one baby of Mrs. Evans's makes
more trouble than all your eight. It cries every night
so that somebody has to be up walking with it ; it wears
out all the nurses, and keeps poor Mrs. Evans sick all
the time."

" Not the least need of it ; nothing but shiftless ma-
nagement. Suppose I had allowed my children to be
walked with ; I might have had terrible times, too ;
but I began right. I set down my foot that they
should lie still, and they did ; and if they cried, I

122 LITTLE FOXES.

never lighted a candle, or took *em np, or took any-
kind of notice of it ; and so, after a little, they went
off to sleep. Babies very soon find out where they
can take advantage, and where they can't. It's
nothing but temper makes babies cry ; and if I couldn't
hush 'em any other way, I should give 'em a few good
smart slaps, and they would soon learn to behave
themselves."

" But, dear Mrs. Exact, you were a strong healthy
woman, and had strong healthy children."

"Well, isn't that baby of Mrs. Evans's healthy, I
want to know? I'm sure it is a great creature, and
thrives and grows fat as fast as ever I saw a child. You
needn't tell Qie anything is the matter with that child
but temper, and its mother's coddling management."

Now, in the neighbourhood where she lives, Mrs.
Alexander Exact is the wonderful woman, the Lady
Bountiful, the pattern female. Her cake never rises
on one side, or has a heavy streak in it. Her furs
never get a moth in them ; her carpets never fade ; her
sweetmeats never ferment ; her servants never neglect
their Avork ; her children never get things out of order ;
her babies never cry, never keep one awake o'nights ;
and her husband never in his life said, "My dear,
there's a button off my shirt." Flies never infest her
kitchen, cockroaches and red ants never invade her
premises, a spider never had time to spin a web on
one of her walls. Everything in her establishment is
shining with neatness, crisp and bristling with absolute
perfection, — and it is she, the ever-up-and dressed, un-

INTOLEEAJ^CE. 123

sleeping, wide-awake, omnipresent, never-tiring Mrs.
Exact, that does it all.

Besides keeping her household ways thus immaculate,
Mrs. Exact is on all sorts of charitable committees, does
all sorts of fancy-work for fairs ; and whatever she does
is done perfectly. She is a most available, most help-
ful, most benevolent woman, and general society has
reason to rejoice in her existence.

But, for all this, Mrs. Exact is as intolerant as Tor-
quemada or a locomotive engine. She has her own
track, straight and inevitable; her judgments and
opinions cut through society in right lines, with all-
the force of her example and all the steam of her
energy, turning out neither for the old nor the young,
the weak nor the weary. She cannot, and she will not,
conceive the possibility that there may be other sorts
of natures than her own, and that other kinds of natures
must have other ways of living and doing.

Good and useful as she is, she is terrible as an army
with banners to her poor, harassed, delicate, struggling
neighbour, across the way, who, in addition to an aching,
confused head, an aching back, sleepless, harassed nights,
and weary, sinking days, is burdened everywhere and
every hour with the thought that Mrs. Exact thinks
all her troubles are nothing but poor management, and
that she might do just like her, if she would. With
veiy little self-confidence or self-assertion, she is
withered and paralyzed with this discouraging thought.
Js it, then, her fault that this never-sleeping baby cries
all night, and that all her children never could and

124 LITTLE FOXES.

never would be brought up by those exact rules which
she hears of as so efficacious in the hcuisehold over the
way? The thought of Mrs. Alexander Exact stands
over her like a constable ; the remembrance of her is
grievous ; the burden of her opinion is heavier than all
her other burdens.

Now the fact is, that Mrs. Exact comes of a long-
lived, strong-backed, strong-stomached race, with " limbs
of British oak and nerves of wire." The shadow of a
sensation of nervous pain or uneasiness never has been
known in her family for generations, and her judg-
ments of poor little Mrs. Evans are about as intelligent
as those of a good stout Shanghai hen on a humming-
bird. Most useful and comfortable, these Shanghai
hens, — and very ornamental, and in a small way useful,
these humming-birds ; but let them not regulate each
other's diet, or lay down schemes for each other's house-
keeping. Has not one as much right to its nature as
the other?

This intolerance of other people's natures is one of
the greatest causes of domestic unhappiness. The
perfect householders are they who make their household
rule so flexible that all sorts of differing natures may
find room to grow and expand and express themselves
without infringing upon others.

Some women are endowed with a tact for understand-
ing human nature and guiding it. They give a sense
of largeness and freedom ; they find a place for every
one, see at once what every one is good for, and are
inspired by nature with the happy wisdom of not

INTOLERANCE. 125

wishing or asking of any human being, more than that
himian being was made to give. They have the portion
in due season for all : a bone for the dog ; cat-nip for
the cat ; cuttle-fish and hemp-seed for the bird ; a book
or review for their bashful literary visitor; lively
gossip for thoughtless Miss Seventeen; knitting for
Grandmamma; fishing-rods, boats, and gimpowder for
Young Restless, whose beard is just beginning to grow ;
— and they never fall into pets because the canary-
bird won't relish the dog's bone, or the dog eat canary-
seed, or young Miss Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty's
review, or young Master Eestless take delight in
knitting-work, or old Grandmamma feel complacency in
guns and gunpowder.

Again, there are others who lay the foundations of
family life so narrow, straight, and strict, that there is
room in them only for themselves and people exactly
like themselves ; and hence comes much misery.

A man and woman come together out of different
families . and races, often united by only one or two
sympathies, with many differences. Their first wisdom
would be to find out each other's nature, and accommo-
date to it as a fixed fact ; instead of which, how many
spend their lives in a blind fight with an opposite
nature, as good as their own in its way, but not capable
of meeting their requirements !

A woman trained in an exact, thriving, business
family, where her father and brothers carried on every-
thing with true worldly skill and energy, falls in love
with a literary man, who knows nothing of such affairs,

126 LITTLE FOXES.

whose life is in Lis lihraiy and his pen. Shall she vex
and torment herself and him because he is not a business
man? Shall she constantly hold up to him the example
of her father and brothers, and how they would manage
in this and that case? or shall she say cheerily and once
for all to herself, — " My husband has no talent for
business ; that is not his forte ; but then he has talents
far more interesting : I cannot have everything ; let
him go on undisturbed, and do what he can do well,
and let me try to make up for what he cannot do ; and
if difficulties come on us in consequence of what we
neither of us can do, let us both take them cheer-
fully ?"

In the same manner a man takes out of the bosom of
an adoring family one of those delicate, petted singing-
birds that seem to be created simply to adorn life and
make it charming. Is it fair, after he has got her, to
compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capa-
bility in the material part of life, with those of his
mother and sisters, who are strong-limbed, practical
women, that have never thought about anything but
housekeeping from their cradle ? Shall he all the while
vex himself and her with the remembrance of how his
mother used to get up at five o'clock and arrange all
the business of the day, — how she kept all the accounts,
— how she saw to everything and settled everj^thing, —
how there never were break-downs or irregularities in
her system ?

This would be unfair. If a man wanted such a
housekeeper, why did he not get one ? There were

INTOLERANCE. 127

plenty of single women who understood washing, iron-
ing, olear-starcliing, cooking, and general housekeeping,
better than the little canary-bird which he fell in love
with, and wanted for her plumage and her song— for her
meiTy tricks, for her bright eyes and pretty ways. Now
he has got his bird, let him keep it as something fine
and precious, to be cared for and watched over, and
treated according to the laws of its frail and delicate
nature ; and so treating it, he may many years keep the
charms which first won his heart. He may find, too,
if he watches and is careful, that a humming-bird can,
in its own small, dainty way, build a nest as efficiently
as a turkey-gobbler, and hatch her eggs and bring up
her young in humming-bird fashion ; but to do it she
must be left unfrightened and undisturbed.

But the evils of domestic intolerance increase with
the birth of children. As parents come together out of
difi'erent families with ill-assorted peculiarities, so chil-
dren are born to them with natures differing from their
own and from each other.

The parents seize on their first new child as a piece
of special property which they are forthwith to turn to
their own account. The poor little waif, just drifted on
the shores of Time, has perhaps folded up in it a
character as positive as that of either parent ; but, for
all that, its future course is markerl out for it all ar-
ranged and predetermined.

John has a perfect mania for literary distinction.
His own education was somewhat imperfect, but he is
determined his children shall be prodigies. His first-

128 LITTLE FOXES.

born turns out a girl, who is to write like Madame de
Stael, — to be an able, accomplished woman. He bores
her with literature from her earliest years, reads extracts
from Milton to her when she is only eight j^ears old and
is secretly longing to be playing with her doll's ward-
robe. He multiplies governesses, spares no expense,
and when, after all, his daughter turns out to be only
a very pretty, sensible, domestic girl, fond of cross-
stitching embroidery, and with a more decided vocation
for sponge-cake and pickles than for poetry and com-
position, he is disappointed and treats her coldly ; and
she is unhappy and feels that she has vexed her parents,
because she cannot be what nature never meant her to
be. If John had taken meekly the present that Mother
Nature gave him, and humbly set himself to inquire
what it was, and what it was good for, he might have
had years of happiness with a modest, amiable, and
domestic daughter, to whom had been given the instinct
to study household good.

But, again, a bustling, pickling, preserving, stocking-
knitting, universal-housekeeping woman has a daughter
who dreams over her knitting-work, and hides a book
under her sampler, — whose thoughts are strayiug in
Greece, Eome, Germany, — who is reading, studying,
thinking, writing, without knowing why ; and the
mother sets herself to fight this nature, and to make the
dreamy scholar into a driving, thorough-going, exact
woman of business. How many tears are shed, how
much temper wasted, how much time lost in .^uch
encounters !

INTOLERANCE. 129

Eacli of these natures, under judicious training,
might be made to complete itself by cultivation of that
which it lacked. The born housekeeper can never be
made a genius, but she may add to her household virtues
some reasonable share of literary culture and apprecia-
tion, — and the born scholar may learn to come down
out of her clouds, and see enough of this earth to walk
its practical ways without stumbling; but this must
be done by tolerance of their nature, — by giving it
play and room, — first recognizing its existence and its
rights, and then seeking to add to it the properties it
wants.

A driving Yankee housekeeper, fruitful of resources,
can work with any tools or with no tools at all. If she
absolutely cannot get a tack-hammer with a claw on one
end, she can take up carpet-nails with an iron spoon,
and drive them down with a flat-iron ; and she has sense
enough not to scold, though she does her work with
them at considerable disadvantage. She knows that
she is working with tools made to do something else,
and never thinks of being angry at their unhandiness.
She might have equal patience with a daughter unhandy
in physical things, but acute and skilful in mental ones^
if she once had the idea suggested to her.

An ambitious man has a son whom he destines to a
learned profession. He is to be the Daniel "Webster of
the family. The boy has a robust, muscular frame — great
physical vigour and enterprise — a brain bright and active
in all that may be acquired through the bodily senses,
but which is dull and confused and wandering when

130 LITTLE FOXES.

put to abstract book-knowleclge. ITe knows every ship
at the wharf, her build, tonnage, and sailing qualities ;
he knows eveiy railroad-engine, its power, speed, and
hours of coming and going ; he is always busy, sawing,
hammering, planing, digging, driving, making bargains,
with his head full of plans, all relating to something
outward and physical. In all these matters his mind
works strongly, his ideas are clear, his observation
acute, his conversation sensible and worth listening to.
But as to the distinction between common nouns and
proper nouns, between the subject and the predicate of
a sentence, between the relative pronoun and the de-
monstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and
the preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy.
The region of abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts
and shadows. Yet his youth is mainlj'- a dreary wilder-
ness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible studies, of
privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual
failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father
is trying to make a scholar and a literary man out of a
boy whom Nature made to till the soil or manage the
material forces of the world. He might be a farmer, an
engineer, a pioneer of a new settlement, a sailor, a
soldier, a thriving man of business ; but he grows up
feeling that his nature is a crime, and that he is good
for nothing, because he is not good for what he had
been blindly predestined to before he was born.

Another boy is a born mechanic ; he understands
machineiy at a glance : he is always pondering and
studying auii experimenting. But his wheels and

INTOLERANCE. 131

his axles and his pulleys are all swept away, as so much
irrelevant lumber ; he is doomed to go into the Latin
School, and spend three or four years in trying to learn
what he never can learn well, — disheartened by always
being at the tail of his class, and seeing many a boy
inferior to himself in general culture, who is rising to
brilliant distinction simply because he can remember
those hopeless, bewildering Greek quantities and accents
which he is constantly forgetting, — as, for example, how
properispomena become paroxytones when the ultimate
becomes long, and proparoxytones become paroxytones
when the ultimate becomes long, while paroxytones with
a short penult remain paroxytones. Each of this class of
rules, however, having about sixteen exceptions, which
hold good except in three or four other exceptional cases
under them, the labyrinth becomes delightfully wilder
and wilder; and the crowning beauty of the whole is,
that when the bewildered boy has swallowed the whole,
— tail, scales, fins, and bones, — he then is allowed to read
the classics in peace, without the slightest occasion to
refer to them again during his college course.

The great trouble with the so-called classical course
of education is, that it is made strictly but for one class
of minds, which it drills in respects for which they have
by nature an aptitude, and to which it presents scarcely
enough of difficulty to make it a mental discipline, while
to another and equally valuable class of minds it presents
difficulties so great as actually to crush and discourage.
There are, we will venture to say, in every ten boys in
Boston foui', and those not the diiUest or poorest in

132 LITTLE FOXES.

quality, who could never go through the discipline of
the Boston Latin School without such a strain on the
brain and nervous sj'steni as would leave them no power
fur anything else.

A bright, intelligent boy, whose talents lay in the
line of natural philosophy and mechanics, passed with
brilliant success through the Boston English High
School. He won the first medals, and felt all that pride
and enthusiasm which belong to a successful student.
He entered the Latin Classical School. With a large
philosophic and reasoning brain, he had a very poor
verbal and textual memory ; and here he began to see
himself distanced by boys who had hitherto looked up to
him. They could rattle off catalogues of names ; they
could do so all the better from the habit of not thinking
of what they studied. They could commit to memory the
Latin Grammar, large print and small, and run through
the interminable mazes of Greek accents and inflec-
tions. This boy of large mind and brain, alwa3"S behind-
hand, always incapable, utterly discouraged, no amount
of study could place on an equality with his former
inferiors. His health failed, and he dropped from
school. jMany a fine fellow has been lost to himself, and
lost to an educated life, by just such a failure. The
collegiate system is like a great coal-screen : every piece
not of a certain size must fall through. This may do well
enough for screening coal ; but what if it were used in-
discriminately for a mixture of coal and diamonds ?

" Poor boy !" said 01c Bull, compassionately, when
one sought to push a schoolboy from the steps of an

INTOLERANCE. 133

omnibus, where he was getting a surreptitious ride.
** Poor boy! let him stay. AYho knows his trials?
Perhaps he studies Latin !"

The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance
of his early sufferings, — " The Romans would never have
conquered the world if they had had to learn their own
language. They had leisure, because they were born
with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives
in ^m."

Kow we are not among those who decry the Greek
and Latin classics. We think it a glorious privilege to
read both those grand old tongues, and that an intelligent,
cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of the
splendid minds of those olden times, loses a part of his
birthright ; and therefore it is that we mourn that but
one dry, hard, technical path, one sharp, straight, nar-
row way, is allowed into so goodly a land of knowledge.
We think there is no need that the study of Greek and
Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a
man without a verbal -memory, who could neither recite
in order the paradigms of the Greek verbs, nor repeat
the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one
termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exer-
cise of his faculties of comparison and reasoning, could
learn to read the Greek and Latin classics so as to take
their sense and enjoy their spirit ; and that is all that
they are worth caring for. We have known one young-
scholar, who could not by any possibility repeat the lists
of exceptions to the rules in the Latin Grammar, who
yet delightedly filled his private note-book with quota-

134 LITTLE FOXES.

tions from the " JEnoid," and was making extracts of
literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time
that he was every day " screwed " by his tutor upon
some technical point of the language.

Is there not many a master of English, many a writer
and orator, who could not repeat from memory the list
of nouns ending in y that form their plural in ies, with
the exceptions under it ? How many of us could do
this ? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker
to know the whole of Murray's Grammar by heart, or
does real knowledge of a language ever come in this
way?

At present the rich stores of ancient literature are
kept like the savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson
heard simmering in the witch's kettle. One may have
much appetite, but there is but one way of getting it.
The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her
harsh voice, and her " Gape, sinner, and swallow," is
the only introduction, — and so, many a one turns and
runs frightened from the feast.

This intolerant mode of teaching the classical lan-
guages is peculiar to them alone. Multitudes of girls
and boys are learning to read and to speak German,
French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of ex-
patiating in the literature of a new language, purely
because of a simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode
of teaching these languages.

Intolerance in the established system of education
works misery in families, because family pride decrees
that every boy of • good status in society — will he, nill he

INTOLEKANCE. 135

— shall go through college, or he almost forfeits his
position as a gentleman.

"Not go to Cambridge!" says Scholasticus to his
first-born. " Wh}^ I went there, — and my father, and
his father, and his father before him. Look at the
Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our
family ever since the college was founded !"

" But I can't learn Latin and Greek," says young
Scholasticus. " I can't remember all those rules and
exceptions. I've tried and I can't. If you could only
know how my head feels when I try ! And I won't be
at the foot of the class all the time, if I have to get my
living by digging."

Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on 'at the point of
the bayonet to a kind of knowledge in which he has no
interest, communicated in a way that requires faculties
which Nature has not given him, — what occurs ?

He goes through his course, either shamming, shirk-
ing, parrying, all the while consciously discredited and
dishonoured, — or else putting forth an effort that is a
draft on all his nervous energy, he makes merely a
decent scholar, and loses his health for life.

Now, if the principle of toleration were once ad-
mitted into classical education, — if it were admitted that
the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and
the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things
absolutely essential to this result, — if the tortoise were
allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly,
and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine
sources of Helicon, — all might in their own way arrive

136 LITTLE FOXES.

there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its
coolness.

*' But," ssij the advocates of the present system, " it
is good mental discipline."

I doubt it. It is mere waste of time.

When a boy has learned that in the 'genitive plural
of the first declension of Greek nouns the final syllable
is circumflexed, but to this there are the following
exceptions : 1. That feminine adjectives and participles
in -OS, -r], -ov are accented like the genitive masculine,
but other feminine adjectives and participles are peris-
pomena in the genitive plural ; 2. That the substantives
chrestes, aphue, etesiai, and chlounes in the genitiA'e plural
remain paroxytones (Kiihner's Elementary Greek Gram-
mar^ p. 22), — I say, when a boy has learned this and
twenty other things just like it, his mind has not been
one whit more disciplined than if he had learned the
list of the old thirteen States, the number and names of
the newly-adopted ones, the times of their adoption,
and the population, commerce, mineral and agricultural
wealth of each. These, too, are merely exercises of
memory, but they are exercises in what is of some in-
terest and some use.

The particulars above cited are of so little use in
understanding the Greek classics that I will venture to
say that there are intelligent English scholars who
have never read anything but Bohn's translations, who
have more genuine knowledge of the spirit of the Greek
mind, and the peculiar idioms of the language, and more
enthusiasm for it, than many a poor fellow who has

INTOLEKANCE. 137

stumbled blindly tbrougb the originals with the bayonet
of the tutor at his heels, and his eyes and ears full of
the Scotch snuff of the Greek Grammar.

AVhat then ? Shall we not learn these ancient
tongues ? By all means. " So many times as I learn
a language, so many times I become a man," said
Charles V. ; and he said rightly. Latin and Greek are
foully belied by the prejudices created by this technical,
pedantic mode of teaching them, which makes one
ragged, prickly bundle of all the dry facts of the
language, and insists upon it that the boy shall not see
one glimpse of its beauty, glory, or interest, till he has
swallowed and digested the whole mass. Many die in
this wilderness, with their shoes worn out before reach-
ing the Promised Land of Plato and the Tragedians.

"But," say our college authorities, " look at England.
An English school-bo}^ learns three times the Latin
and Greek that our boys learn, and has them well
drubbed in."

And English boys have three times more beef and
pudding in their constitution than American boys have,
and three times less of nerves. The difference of nature
must be considered here ; and the constant influence
flowing from English schools and universities must be
tempered by considering who we are, what sort of boys
we have to deal with, what treatment they can bear, and
what are the needs of our growing American society.

The demands of actual life, the living, visible facts of
practical science, in so large and new a country as ours,
require that the ideas of the ancients should be given us

138 LITTLE FOXES.

in the shortest and most economical way possible, and
that scholastic technicalities should be reserved to those
whom Nature made with especial reference to their
preseiTation .

On no subject is there more intolerant judgment, and
more suftering from such intolerance, than on the much,
mooted one of the education of children.

Treatises on education require altogether too much of
parents, and impose burdens of responsibility on tender
spirits which crush the life and strength out of them.
Parents have been talked to as if each child came to
them a soft, pulpy mass, which they were to pinch and
pull and pat and stroke into shape quite at their leisure,
— and a good pattern being placed there before them,
they were to proceed immediately to set up and con-
struct a good human being in conformity therewith.

It is strange that believers in the divine inspiration
of the Bible should have entertained this idea, over-
looking the constant and affecting declaration of the
great Heavenly Father that He has nourished and
brought up children and they have rebelled against
Him, together with His constant appeals, — " AVhat could
have been done more to my vineyard that I have not
done in it ? Wherefore, when I looked that it should
bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes ?" If
even God — wiser, better, purer, more loving — admits
Himself baffled in this great Avork, is it expedient to say
to human beings that the forming power, the deciding
force, of a child's character is in their hands ?

Many a poor feeble woman's health has been strained

INTOLERANCE. 139

to breaking, and her life darkened, by the laying on her
shoulders of a burden of responsibility that never ought
to have been placed there ; and many a mother has been
hindered from using such powers as God has given her,
because some preconceived mode of operation has been
set up before her which she could no more make
effectual than David could wear the armour of Saul.

A gentle, loving, fragile creature marries a strong-
willed, energetic man, and, by the laws of natural
descent, has a boy given to her of twice her amount of
will and energy. She is just as helpless, in the mere
struggle of will and authority, with such a child, as she
would be in a physical wrestle with a six-foot man.

What then ? Has Nature left her helpless for her
duties ? Not if she understands her nature, and acts in
the line of it. She has no power of command, but she has
power of persuasion. She can neither bend nor break
the boy's iron will, but she can melt it. She has tack
to avoid the conflict in which she would be worsted.
She can charm, amuse, please, and make willing ; and
her fine and subtile influences, weaving themselves about
him day after day, become more and more powerful. Let
her alone, and she will have her boy yet.

But now some bustling mother-in-law or other pri-
vileged expounder says to her, —

" My dear, it's your solemn duty to break that boy's
will. I broke my boy's will short off. Keep your whip
in sight, meet him at every turn, fight him whenever
he crosses you, never let him get one victory, and finally
his will will be wholly subdued."

140 LITTLE FOXES.

Such advice is mischievous, because what it proposes
is as utter an imi^ossibility to the woman's nature as for
a cow to scratch up worms for her calf, or for a hen to
suckle her chickens.

There are men and women of strong, resolute will
who are gifted with the power of governing the wills
of others. Such persons can govern in this way, — and
their government, being in the line of their nature,
acting strongly, consistently, naturally'', makes every-
thing move harmoniously. Let them be content with
their own success, but let them not set up as general
education-doctors, or apply their experience to all pos-
sible cases.

Again, there are others, and among them some of the
loveliest and purest natures, who have no power of
command. The}^ have sufficient tenacity of will as
respects their own course, but have no compulsory
power over the wills of others. Many such women
have been most successful mothers, when they followed
the line of their own natures, and did not undertake
what they never could do.

Injluence is a' slower acting force than authority. It
seems weaker, but in the long run it often effects more.
It always does better than mere force and authority
without its gentle modifying power.

If a mother is high-principled, religious, affectionate,
if she never uses craft or deception, if she governs her
temper and sets a good example, let her hold on in good
hope, though she cannot produce the discij^line of a
man-of-war in her noisy little flock, or make all move

INTOLEKANCE. 141

as smoothly as some other women to whom God has
given another and different talent ; and let her not be
discouraged, if she seem often to accomplish but little
in that great work of forming human character, wherein
the great Creator of the world has declared Himself at
times baffled.

Family tolerance must take great account of the
stages and periods of development and growth in
children.

The passage of a human being from one stage of
development to another, like the sun's passage across
the equator, frequently has its storms and tempests.
The chano-e to manhood and womanhood often involves
brain, nerves, bod}'-, and soul in confusion; the child
sometimes seems lost to himself and his parents, — his
very nature changing. In this sensitive state come
restless desires, unreasonable longings, unsettled pur-
poses; and the fatal habit of indulgence in deadly
stimulants, ruining all the life, often springs from the
cravings of this transition period.

Here must come in the patience of the saints. The
restlessness must be soothed, the family hearth must be
tolerant enough to keep there the boy, whom Satan will
receive and cherish if his mother does not. The male
element sometimes pours into a boy, like the tides in
the Bay of Fundy, with tumult and tossing. He is
noisy, vociferous, uproarious, and seems bent only on
disturbance; he despises conventionalities, he hates
parlours, he longs for the woods, the sea, the converse
of rouii-h men, and kicks at constraint of all kinds.

142 LITTLE FOXES.

Have patience now, let love have its perfect work, and
in a year or two, if no deadly physical habits set in,
a quiet, well-mannered gentleman will be evolved.
Meanwhile, if he does not wipe his shoes, and if he
will fling his hat upon the floor, and tear his clothes,
and bang and hammer and shout, and cause general
confusion in his belongings, do not despair ; if you
only get your son, the hat and clothes and shoes and
noise and confusion do not matter. Any amount of
toleration that keeps a boy contented at home is
treasure well expended at this time of life.

One thing not enough reflected on is, that in this
transition period between childhood and maturity the
heaviest draft and strain of school education occurs.
The boy is fitting for the university, the girl going
through the studies of the college senior year, and the
brain-power, which is working almost to the breaking-
point to perfect the physical change, has the additional
labour of all the drill and discipline of school.

The girl is growing into a tall and shapely woman,
and the poor brain is put to it to find enough phosphate
of lime, carbon, and other what not to build her fair
edifice. The bills flow in upon her thick and fast;
she pays out hand over hand : if she had only her
woman to build, she might get along, but now come
in demands for algebra, geometry, music, language,
and the poor brain-bank stops payment; some part of
the work is shabbily done, and a crooked spine or
weakened lungs are the result.

Boarding-schools, both for boys and girls, are for the

INTOLERANCE. 143

most part composed] of young peojDle in this most deli-
cate, critical portion of tlieir physical, mental, and
moral development, whose teachers are expected to put
them through one straight, severe course of drill, with-
out the slightest allowance for the great physical facts
of their being. Xo wonder they are difficult to manage,
and that so many of them drop, physically, mentally,
and morally halt and maimed. It is not the teacher's
fault ; he but fulfils the parent's requisition, which
dooms his child without appeal to a certain course,
simply because others have gone through it.

Finally, as my sermon is too long already, let me end
with a single reflection. Every human being has some
handle by which he may be lifted, some groove in which
he was meant to run ; and the great work of life, as
far as our relations with each other are concerned, is to
lift each one by his own proper handle, and run each
one in his own proper groove.

144 LITTLE FOXES.

VI.

DISCOURTEOUSXESS.

" TTIOR my part," said my wife, " I think one of the
-L greatest destroyers of domestic peace is Dis-
courtesy. People neglect, with their nearest friends,
those refinements and civilities which they practise
with strangers."

" My dear Madam, I am of another opinion," said Bob
Stephens. " The restraints of etiquette, the formalities
of ceremony, are beauteous enough in out-door life ;
but when a man comes home, he wants leave to take off
his tight boots and gloves, wear the gown and slippers,
and speak his mind freely without troubling his head
where it hits. Home life should be the communion of
people who have learned to understand each other, who
allow each other a generous latitude and freedom. One
wants one place where he may feel at liberty to be tired
or dull or disagreeable without ruining his character.
Home' is the place where we should expect to live
somewhat on the credit which a full knowledge of each
other's goodness and worth inspires; and it is not
necessary for intimate friends to go every day through
those civilities and attentions which they j^i'actise with
strangers, any more than it is necessary, among literary
people, to repeat the alphabet over every day before one
begins to read."

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 145

"Yes," said Jennie, "when a young gentleman is
paying his addresses, he helps a yonng lady out of a
carriage so tenderly, and holds back her dress so
adroitly, that not a particle of mud gets on it from the
wheels; but when the mutual understanding is complete,
and the affection perfect, and she is his wife, he sits still
and holds the horse, and lets her climb out alone. To
be sure, when pretty Miss Titmouse is visiting them, he
still shows himself gallant, flies from the carriage, and
holds back her dress : that's because he doesn't love her
nor she him, and they are not on the ground of mutual
affection. When a gentleman is only engaged, or a
friend, if you hem him a cravat, or mend his gloves, he
thanks you in the blandest manner ; but when you are
once sure of his affection, he only says, ' Very well ;
now I wish you would look over my shirts, and mend
that rip in my coat,— and be sure you don't forget it, as
you did yesterday.' For all which reasons," said Miss
Jennie, with a toss of her pretty head, "I mean to put
off marrying as long as possible, because I think it far
more agreeable to have gentlemen friends with whom I
stand on the ground of ceremony and politeness than to
be restricted to one who is living on the credit of his
affection. I don't want a man who gapes in my face,
reads a newspaper all breakfast-time while I want
somebody to talk to, smokes cigars all the evenino-, or
reads to himself when I should like him to be enter-
taining, and considers his affection for me as his right
and title to make himself generally disagreeable. If
he has a bright face, and pleasant, entertaining, gallant

14G . LITTLE FOXES.

ways, I like to bo among the ladies who may have the
benefit of them, and should take care how I lost my
title to it by coming with him on the ground of domestic
aflection."

"Well, Miss Jennie," said Bob, " it isn't merely our
sex who are guilty of making themselves less agreeable
after marriage. Your dapper little fairy creatures, who
dazzle us so with wondrous and fresh toilettes, who are
so trim and neat and sprightly and enchanting, what
becomes of them after marriage ? If he reads the news-
paper at the breakfast- table, perhaps it's because there
is a sleepy, dowdy woman opposite, in a faded gingham
wrapper, put on in the sacredness of domestic privacy,
and perhaps she has laid aside those crisp, sparkling,
bright little sayings and doings that used to make it
impossible to look at or listen to anybody else when she
was about. Such things are, sometimes, among the
goddesses, I believe. Of course, Marianne and I know
nothing of these troubles ; we, being a model pair, sit
among the clouds and speculate on all these matters
as spectators merely."

" Well, you see what your principle leads to, carried
out," said Jennie. " If home is merely the place where
one may feel at liberty to be tired or dull or disagree-
able, without losing one's character, I think women,
have far more right to avail themselves of the liberty
than men ; for all the lonesome, dull, disagreeable
part of home-life comes into their department. It is
they who must keep awake with the baby, if it frets ;
and if they do not feel spirits to make an attractive

BISCOUETEOUSNESS. 147

toilette in the morning, or have not the airy, graceful
fancies that they had when they were girls, it is not so
very much against them. A housekeeper and nursery-
maid cannot be expected to be quite as elegant in her
toilette and as entertaining in her ways as a girl with-
out a care in her father's house ; but I think that this
is no excuse for husbands neglecting the little civilities
and attentions which they used to show before marriage.
They are strong and well and hearty ; go out into the
world and hear and see a great deal that keeps their
minds moving] and awake ; and they ought to entertain
their wives after marriage just as their wives enter-
tained them before. That's the way my husband must
do, or I will never have one, — and it will be small loss,
if I don't," said Miss Jennie.

" Well," said Bob, " I must endeavour to initiate
Charley Sedley in time."

" Charley Sedley, Bob !" said Jennie, with crimson
indignation. " I wonder you will always bring up that
old story, when I've told you a hundred times how dis-
agreeable it is ! Charley and I are good friends,
but "

" There, there," said Bob, " that will do ; you don't
need to proceed further."

" You only said that because you couldn't answer my
argument," said Jennie.

"Well, my dear," said Bob, "j^ou know everything
has two sides to it, and I'll admit that you have brought
up the opposite side to mine quite handsomely ; but for
all that, I am convinced that, if what I said was not

148 LITTLE FOXES.

really the tnith, jet the truth lies somewhere in the
vicinity of it. As I said before, so I say again, tnie
love ought to beget freedom which shall do away with
the necessity of ceremony, and much may and ought to
be tolerated, among our near and dear friends, that
would be discourteous among 'strangers. I am just as
sure of this as of anythiug in the world."

" And yet," said my wife, " there is certainly truth
in the much quoted lines of Cowper, on Friendship,
where he says, —

•' As similarity of mind.
Or something not to be defined,

First fixes our attention,
So manners decent and polite,
The same we practised at first sight,

Will save it from declension."

" Well, now," said Bob, " I've seen enough of French
politeness between married people. "When I was in
Paris, I remember, there was in our boarding-house a
Madame de Villiers, whose husband had conferred upon
her his name and the de belonging to it, in consideration
of a snug little income which she brought to him by
the marriage. His conduct towards her was a perfect
model of all the graces of civilized life. It was true
that he lived on her income, and spent it promenading
the Boulevards, and visiting theatres and operas with
divers fair friends of easy morals ; still all this was so
courteously, so politely, so diplomatically arranged with
jVIadame, that it was quite worth while to be neglected
and cheated for the saiie of having the thing done in

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 149

SO finished and elegant a manner, according to bis
showing. Monsieur had taken the neat little apartment
for her in our pension^ because his circumstances were
embarrassed, and he would be in despair to drag such a
creature into hardships which he described as terrific,
and which he was resolved, heroically, to endure alone
No, while a sous remained to them, his adored Julie
should have her apartment and the comforts of life
secured to her, while the barest attic should suffice for
him. Never did he visit her without kissing her hand
with the homage due to a princess, complimenting her
on her good looks, bringing bonbons, entertaining her
with most ravishing small-talk of all the interesting
on-dits in Paris ; and these visits were more particularly
frequent as the time for receiving her quarterly instal-
ments approached. And so Madame adored him, and
could refuse him nothing, believed all his stories, and
was well content to live on a fourth of her own income
for the sake of so engaging a husband."

" Well," said Jennie, " I don't know to what purpose
your anecdote is related, but to me it means simply
this : if a rascal without heart, without principle, with-
out any good quality, can win and keep a woman's
heart merely by being invariably polite and agreeable
while in her presence, how much more might a man
of sense and principle and real affection do by the
same means. I'm sure, if a man who neglects a
woman, and robs her of her money, nevertheless
keeps her affections, merely because whenever he sees
her he is courteous and attentive, it certainly shows

150 LITTLE FOXES.

that courtesy stands for a great deal in tlie matter of
love."

" With foolisli women," said Bob.

" Yes, and with sensible ones too," said my wife.
" Your Monsieur presents a specimen of the French
way of doing a bad thing ; but I know a poor woman
whose husband did the same thing in English fashion,
without kisses or compliments. Instead of flattering,
he swore at her, and took her money away without the
ceremony of presenting bonbons ; and I assure you, if
the thing must be done at all, I would, for my part
much rather have it done in the French than the
English manner. The courtesy, as far as it goes, is a
good, and far better than nothing, — though, of course,
one would rather have substantial good with it. If one
must be robbed, one would rather have one's money
wheedled away agreeably, with kisses and bonbons,
than be knocked down and trampled upon."

" The mistake that is made on this subject," said I,
" is in comparing, as people generally do, a polished
rascal with a boorish good man ; but the polished rascal
should be compared with the polished good man, and
the boorish rascal with the boorish good man and then
we get the true value of the article.

*' It is true as a general rule, that those races of men
that are most distinguislied for outward urbanity and
courtesy are the least distinguished for truth and sin-
cerity ; and hence the well-known alliterations, ' fair
and false,' ' smooth and slipper3\' The fair and false
Greek, the polished and wily Italian, the courteous and

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 151

deceitful Frencliman, are associations which, to the
strong, downright, courageous Anglo-Saxon, make up-
and-down rudeness and blunt discourteousness a mark
of truth and honest3\

" Ko one can read French literature without feelino-
how the element of courteousness pervades every depart-
ment of life,— how carefully people avoid being per-
sonall}^ disagreeable in their intercourse. A domestic
quarrel, if we may trust French plays, is carried on
with all the refinements of good breeding, and insults
are given with elegant civility. It seems impossible
to translate into French the direct and downright bru-
talities which the English tongue allows. The whole
intercourse of life is arranged on the understanding
that all personal contacts shall be smooth and civil,
and such as to obviate the necessity of personal jostle
and jar.

" Does a Frenchman engage a clerk or other employe,
and afterwards hear a report to his disadvantage, the
last thing he would think of would be to tell a down-
right unpleasant truth to the man. He writes him a
civil note, and tells him, that, in consequence of an
unexpected change of business, he shall not need an
assistant in that department, and much regrets that this
will deprive him of Monsieur's agreeable society, &c.

" A more striking example cannot be found of this
sort of intercourse than the representation in the life
of Madame George Sand, of the proceedings between
her father and his mother. There is all the romance of
affection between this mother and son. He writes her

152 LITTLE FOXES.

the most devoted letters, lie kisses her hand on every
pige, he is the very image of a gallant, charming, love-
able son, while at the same time he is secretly making
arrangements for a private marriage with a woman of
low rank and indifferent reputation, — a marriage whicli
he knows would be like death to his mother. He
marries, lives with his wife, has one or two children
by her, before he will pain the heart of his adored
mother by telling her the truth. The adored mother
suspects her son, but no trace of the suspicion appears
in her letters to him. The question which an English
parent would level at him point-blank, she is entirely
too delicate to address to her dear Maurice ; but she
puts them to the Prefect of Police, and ferrets out the
marriage through legal documents, while yet no trace
of this knowledge dims the affectionateness of her
letters, or the serenity of her reception of her son
when he comes to bestow on her the time which he can
spare from his family cares. In an English or American
family there would have been a battle roj^al, an open
I'uj^ture ; whereas this courteous son and mother go on
for years with this polite drama, she pretending to be
deceived while she is not, and he supposing that he is
sparing her feelings by the deception.

" Now it is the reaction from such a style of life on
the truthful Anglo-Saxon nature that leads to an under-
valuing of courteousness, as if it were of necessity opposed
to sincerity. But it does not follow, because all is not
gold that glitters, that nothing that glitters is gold, and
because courteousness and delicacy in personal inter-

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 153

course are often perverted to deceit, that they are not
valuable allies of truth. No woman would prefer a
slippery, plausible rascal to a rough, unceremonious
honest man ; but of two men equally truthful and affec-
tionate, every woman would prefer the courteous one."

" Well," said Bob, " there is a loathsome, sickly
stench of cowardice and distrust about all this kind of
French delicacy that is enough to drive an honest fellow
to the other extreme. True love ought to be a robust,
hardy plant, that can stand a free out-door life of sun
and wind and rain. People who are too delicate and
courteous ever fully to speak their minds to each other
are apt to have stagnant residuums of unpleasant
feelings, which breed all sorts of gnats and mosquitoes.
My rule is. Say everything out as you go along ; have
your little tiffs, and get over them ; jar and jolt and rub
a little, and learn to take rubs and bear jolts.

*' If I take less thought and use less civility of
expression, in announcing to Marianne that her coffee is
roasted too much, than I did to old Mrs. Pollux when I
boarded with her, it's because I take it Marianne is
somewhat more a part of myself than old Mrs. Pollux
was, — that there is an intimacy and confidence between
us which will enable us to use the short-hand of life, —
that she will not fall into a passion or fly into hysterics,
but will merely speak to cook in good time. If I don't
thank her for mending my glove in just the style that I
did when I was a lover, it is because now she does that
sort of thing for me so often that it would be a down-
right bore to her to have me always on my knees about

154 LITTLE FOXES.

it. All that I could think of to say about her graceful
handiness and her delicate needle-work has been said so
often, and is so well understood, that it has entirely
lost the zest of originality. Marianne and I have had
sundry little battles, in which the victor}'- came out on
both sides, each of us thinking the better of the other
for the vigour and spirit with which we conducted
matters ; and our habit of perfect plain-speaking and
truth-telling to each other is better than all the deli-
cacies that ever were hatched up in the hot-bed of
French sentiment."

" Perfectly true, perfectly right," said I. " Every
word good as gold. Truth before all things ; sincerity
.before all things : pure, clear, diamond-bright sincerit}^
is of more value than the gold of 02:»hir : the foundation
of all love must rest here. How those people do who
live in the nearest and dearest intimacy with friends
who they believe will lie to them for any purpose, even
the most refined and delicate, is a mj^stery to me. If I
once know that m}^ wife or my friend will tell me only
what they think will be agreeable to me, then I am at
once lost — my way is a pathless quicksand. But all this
being premised, I still say that we Anglo-Saxons might
improve our domestic life if we would graft upon the
strong stock of its homely sincerity, the courteous
graces of the French character.

*' If anybody wishes to know exactly what I mean by
this, let him read the IMemoir of De Tocqueville, whom
I take to be the representative of the French ideal man ;
and certainly the kind of family life which his domestic

DISCOUETEOUSNESS. 155

letters disclose lias a delicacy and a beauty wMcli adorn
its solid worth.

" AVhat I liave to say on tliis matter is, that it is very
dangerous for any individual man or any race of men
continually to cry up the virtues to which they are
constitutionally inclined, and to be constantly dwelling
with reprobation on faults to which they have no
manner of temptation.

*' I think that we of the English race may set it down
as a general rule that we are in no danger of becoming
hypocrites in domestic life through an extra sense of
politeness, and are in some danger of becoming boors from
a rough, uncultivated instinct of sincerity. But to bring
the matter to a practical point, I will specify some par-
ticulars in which the courtesy we show to strangers
might with advantage be grafted into our home-life.

"In the first place, then, let us watch our course
when we are entertaining strangers whose good opinion
we wish to propitiate. We dress ourselves with care,
we study what it will be agreeable to say, we do not
suffer our natural laziness to prevent our being very
alert in paying small attentions, we start across the
room for an easier chair, we stoop to pick up the fan,
we search for the mislaid newspaper, and all this for
persons in whom we have no particular interest beyond
the passing hour ; while, with those friends whom we
love and respect, we sit in our old faded habiliments,
and let them get their own chair, and look up their own
newspaper, and fight their own way daily, without any
of this preventing care.

15G LITTLE FOXES.

" In the matter of personal adornment, especiall}-,
there are a gi-eat many people who are chargeable with
the same fault that I have already* spoken of, in reference
to household arrangements. They have a splendid
wardrobe for company, and a shabby and sordid one for
domestic life. A woman puts all her income into party-
dresses, and thinks anything will do to wear at home.
All her old tumbled finery, her frayed, dirty silks and
soiled ribbons, are made to do duty for her hours of
intercourse with her dearest friends. Some seem to be
really principled against wearing a handsome dress in
every-day life ; they ' cannot afford ' to be well-dressed
in private. Now what I should recommend would be,
to take the money necessary for one or two party-
dresses and spend it upon an appropriate and tasteful
home-toilette, and to make it an avowed object to look
prettily at home.

" We men are a sort of stupid, blind animals : we
know when we are pleased, but we don't know what it
is that pleases us ; we say we don't care anything about
flowers, but if there is a flower-garden under our
window, somehow or other, we are dimly conscious of
it, and feel that there is something pleasant there ; and
60 when our wives and daughters are prettily and
tastefully attired, we know it, and it gladdens our life
far more than we are, perhaps, aware of."

*' Well, papa," said Jennie, *' I think men ought
to take just as much pains to get themselves up nicely
after marriage as women. I think there are such
things as tumbled shirt-collars and frowzy hair and

DISCOUETEOUSNESS. 157

mnddy shoes, brought into the domestic sanctuary, as
well as frayed silks and dirty ribbons."

" Certainly," I said ; " but you know we are the
natural Hottentot, and you are the missionaries who are
to keep us from degenerating ; we are the clumsy, old,
blind Vulcan, and you the fair Cytherea, the bearers of
the magic cestus, and therefore it is to you that this
head more particularly belongs.

*' Now I maintain that in family-life there should be
an effort not only to be neat and decent in the arrange-
ment of our person, but to be also what ihe French call
coquette, — or to put it in plain English, there should be
an endeavour to make ourselves look handsome in the
eyes of our dearest friends.

*' Many worthy women, who would not for the world
be found wanting in the matter of personal neatness,
seem somehow to have the notion that any study of
the arts of personal beauty in family-life is, unmatronly ;
they buy their clothes with simple reference to economy,
and have them made up without any question of be-
comingness ; and hence marriage sometimes transforms
a charming, trim, tripping young lady into a waddling
matron whose ever^-day toilette suggests only the idea
of a feather-bed tied round with a string. For my part,
I do not believe that the summary banishment of the
Graces from the domestic circle, as soon as the first baby
makes its appearance, is at all conducive to domestic
affection. Nor do I think that there is any need of so
doing. These good housewives are in danger, like
other saints, of falling into the error of neglecting the

158 LITTLE FOXES.

body tlirongli too inucli tliouglitfulness for others and
too little for themselves. If a woman ever had any
attractiveness, let her try and keep it, setting it doAvn
as one of her domestic talents. As for my erring
brothers who violate the domestic sanctuary by tousled
hair, tumbled linen, and muddy shoes, I deliver them
over to Miss Jennie without benefit of clergy.

" My second head is, that there should be in family-
life tlie same delicacy in the avoidance of disagreeable
topics, that characterizes the intercourse of refined
societ}'' among strangers.

" I do not think that it makes family-life more sincere,
or any more honest, to have tlie members of a domestic
circle feel a freedom to blurt out in each other's faces,
without thought or care, all the disagreeable things
that may occur to them : as, for example, ' How horridly
you look this morning! What's the matter with you ?'
— ' Is there a pimple coming on your nose ? or what is
that spot ?' — ' What made you buy such a dreadfully
unbecoming dress? It sets like a witch ! Who cut it?'
— ' What makes you wear that pair of old shoes ?' —
* Holloa, Bess ! is that your party-rig ? I should think
you were going out for a w^alking advertisement of a
flower-store!' — Observations of this kind between hus-
bands and wives, brothers and sisters, or intimate friends,
do not indicate sincerity, but obtuseness ; and the per-
son who remarks on the pimple on your nose is, in many
cases, just as apt to deceive you as the most accom-
plished Frenchwoman who avoids disagreeable topics
in your presence.

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 159

*' Many families seem to think that it is a proof of
family imion and good-nature that they can pick each
other to pieces, joke on each other's feelings and infir-
mities, and treat each other with a general tally-ho-ing
rudeness, without any offence or ill-feeling. If there
is a limping sister, there is a never-failing supply of
jokes on 'Dot-and- go-one;' and so with other defects
and peculiarities of mind or manners. Kow the per-
fect good-nature and mutual confidence which allow
all this liberty are certainly admirable ; but the liberty
itself is far from making home-life interesting or agree-
able.

"Jokes upon personal or mental infirmities, and a
general habit of saying things in jest which would be
the height of rudeness if said in earnest, are all habits
which take from the delicacy of family affection.

" In all this rough playing with edge-tools, many are
hit and hurt who are ashamed or afraid to complain.
And, after all, what possible good or benefit comes from
it? Courage to say disagreeable tilings, when it is
necessary to say them for the highest good of the person
addressed, is a sublime quality ; but a careless habit of
saying them, in the mere freedom of family intercourse,
is certainly as great a spoiler of the domestic vines as
any fox running.

" There is one point under this head, which I enlarge
upon for the benefit of my own sex, — I mean table-
criticisms. The conduct of housekeeping, in the pre-
sent state of domestic service, certainly requires great
allowance; and the habit of unceremonious comuient

IGO LITTLE FOXES.

on the cooking and appointments of the table, in which
some husbands habitually indulge, is the most unpar-
donable form of domestic iTideness. If a wife has
philosophy enough not to mind it, so much the worse
for her husband, as it confirms him in an unseemly
habit, embarrassing to guests and a bad example to
children. If she has no feelings that he is boinid to
respect, he should at least respect decorum and good
taste, and confine the discussion of such matters to
private intercourse, and not initiate eveiy guest and
child into the grating and greasing of the wheels of the
domestic machinery.

*' Another thing, in which families might imitate the
politeness of strangers, is a wdse reticence with regard
to the asking of questions and the offering of advice.

"A large famil}'- includes many persons of different
tastes, habits, modes of thinking and acting, and it
would be wise and well to leave to each one that measure
of freedom in these respects, which the laws of general
politeness require. Brothers and sisters may love each
other very much, and yet not enough to make joint-
stock of all their ideas, plans, wishes, schemes, fiiend-
ships. There are in every family circle individuals
whom a certain sensitiveness of nature inclines to
quietness and reserve ; and there are very well-meaning
families where no such quietness or reserve is possible.
Nobody can be let alone, nobody may have a secret,
nobody can move in any direction, without a host of
inquiries and comments. * Whom is your letter from ?
Let's see.' — ' My letter is from So-and-so.' — He Avriting

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 161

to yoii ? I didn't know that. ^Vliat's he writing ahont ?'
— ' Where did you go yesterday ? AVhat did you buy ?
What did j'ou give for it ? What are you going to do
with it T — ' Seems to me that's an odd way to do. I
shouldn't do so.' — ' Look here, Mary ; Sarah's going to
have a dress of silk tissue this spring. Now I think
they're too dear, — don't you ?'

" I recollect seeing in some author a description of a
true gentleman, in which, among other traits, he was
characterized as the man that asks the fewest questions.
This trait of refined society might be adopted into
home-life in a far greater degree than it is, and make
it far more agreeable.

*' If there is perfect unreserve and mutual confidence,
let it show itself in free communications coming: un-
solicited. It may fairly be presumed, that, if there is
anything our intimate friends wish us to know, they
will tell us of it, — and that when we are on close and
confidential terms with persons, and there are topics on
which they do not speak to us, it is because, for some
reason, they prefer to keep silence concerning them ;
and the delicacy that respects a friend's silence is one
of the charms of life.

" As with the asking of questions, so with the ofi'er-
ing of advice, there should be among friends a wise
reticence.

*' Some families are always calling each other to
accoimt at every step of the day. ' W^hat did you put
on that dress for? Why didn't you wear that?' — ' What
did you do this for ? Why didn't you do that?' — ' Now

102 LITTLE FOXES.

/ should advise you to do thus and so.' — And these
comments and criticisms and advices are accompanied
with an energy of feeling that makes it rather difficult
to disregard them.

" Now it is no matter how dear and how good our
friends may he, if they ahridge our liherty and fetter
the free exercise of our life, it is inevitahle that we
shall come to enjoying ourselves much better where
they are not, than where the}' are ; and one of the
reasons why brothers and sisters or children so often
diverge from the family circle in the choice of con-
fidants is, that extraneous friends are bound b}' certain
laws of delicacy not to push inquiries, criticisms, or
advice too far.

" Parents would do well to remember in time when
their children have grown up into independent human
beings, and use with a wise moderation those advisory
and admonitory powers with which they guided their
earlier days. Let us give everybody a right to live his
own life, as far as possible, and avoid imposing our own
peculiarities on another.

"If I were to picture a perfect family, it should be a
union of people of individual and marked character,
who, through love, have come to a perfect appreciation
of each other, and who so wisely understand themselves
and one another, that each may move freely along his
or her own track without jar or jostle, — a family where
affection is always sympathetic and receptive, but never
inquisitive, — where all personal delicacies are respected,
— and where there is a sense of privacy and seclusion

DISCOURTEOUSNESS. 163

in following one's own course, unchallenged by the
watchfulness of others, yet withal a sense of society and
support in a knowledge of the kind dispositions and
interpretations of all around.

" In treating of family discourtesies, I have avoided
speaking of those which come from ill-temper and brute
selfishness, because these are sins more than mistakes.
An angry person is generally impolite; and where con-
tention and ill-will are, there can be no courteousness.
"What I have mentioned are rather the lackings of good
and often admirable people, who merely need to consider
in their family-life a little more of whatsoever things are
lovely. With such the mere admission of anything to
be pursued as a duty secures the purpose ; only in their
somewhat earnest pursuit of the substantial of life,
they drop and pass by the little things that give it
sweetness and perfume. To such, a word is enough, and
that word is said."

IGi LITTLE FOXES.

VII.

EXACTINGXESS.

AT length I am arrived at my seventh fox, — the last
of the domestic quadrupeds against which I have
vowed a crusade ; and here opens the chase of him. I
call him —

EXACTINGNESS.

And having done this, I drop the metaphor, fur fear of
chasing it beyond the rules of graceful rhetoric, and
shall proceed to dej&ne the trait.

All the other domestic faults of w^hich I have treated
have relation to the manner in which the ends of life
are pursued ; but this one is an underlying, false, and
diseased state of conception as to the very ends and
purposes of life itself.

If a piano is tuned to exact concert pitch, the majority
of voices must fall below it; for which reason most
people indulgently allow their pianos to be tuned a
little below this point, in accommodation to the average
compass of the human voice. Persons of only ordinary
powers of voice wcjuld be considered absolute mono-
maniacs, who should insist on having their pianos tuned
to accord wdth any abstract notion of propriety or per-
fection, — rendering themselves wretched by persistently

EXACTINGNESS. 165

singing all their pieces miserably out of tune in con-
sequence.

Yet there are persons who keep the requirements of
life strained up always at concert pitch, and are thus
worn out and made miserable all their days by the
grating of a perpetual discord.

There is a faculty of the human mind to which
phrenologists have given the name of ideality, which is
at the foundation of this exactingness. Ideality is the
faculty by which we conceive of and long for perfection ;
and at a glance it will be seen, that, so far from being
an evil ingredient of human nature, it is the one element
of progress that distinguishes man's nature from that of
the brute. While animals go on from generation to
generation, learning nothing and forgetting nothing,
practising their small oircle of the arts of life no better
and no worse from year to year, man is driven by
ideality to constant invention and alteration, whence
come arts, sciences, and the whole progress of society.
Ideality induces discontent with present attainments,
possessions, and performances, and hence come better
and better ones. So in morals, ideality constantly incites
to higher and nobler modes of living and thinking, and
is the faculty to which the most efiective teachings of
the great Master of Christianity are addressed. To be
dissatisfied with present attainments, with earthly
things and scenes, to aspire and press on to something
for ever fair, yet for ever receding before our steps, —
this is the teaching of Christianity, and the work of the
Christian.

1G6 LITTLE FOXES.

But every faculty lias its own instinctive, wild
growth, which, like the spontaneous produce of the
earth, is crude and weedy.

Eevenge, says Lord Bacon, is a sort of wild justice,
obstinacy is untutored firmness, — and so exactingness is
untrained idealit}''; and a vast deal of misery, social
and domestic, comes, not of the faculty, but of its un-
trained exercise.

The faculty, which is ever conceiving and desiring
something better and more perfect, must be modified in
its action by good sense, patience, and conscience, or it
induces a morbid, discontented spirit, which courses
through the veins of individual and family-life like a
subtle poison.

In a certain neighbourhood are two families whose
social and domestic animus illustrates the difierence
betw^een ideality and the want of it.

The Day tons are a large, easy-natured, joyous race,
hospitable, kindly, and friendly.

Nothing about their establishment is much above
mediocrity. The grounds are tolerably kept, the table
is tolerably fair, the servants moderately good, and
the family character and attainments of the same
average level.

Mrs. Daj^ton is a decent housekeeper, and so her
bread be not sour, her butter not frowy, the food
abundant, and the table-cloth and dishes clean, she
troubles her head little with the niceties and refine-
ments of the menage.

She accepts her children as they come from the

EXACTINGNESS. 167

hand of Xatnre, simply opening her e^^es to discern
what they are, never raising the query what she
would have had them, — forming no very high ex-
pectations concerning them, and well content with
whatever develops.

A visitor in the family can easily see a thousand
defects in the conduct of affairs, in the management of
the children, and in this, that, and the other department
of the household arrangements ; but he can see and feel,
also, a perfect comfortableness in the domestic atmo-
sphere that almost atones for any defects. He can see
that in a thousand respects things might be better done,
if the family were not perfectly content to have them as
they are, and that each individual member might
make higher attainments in various directions, were
there not such entire satisfaction with what is already
attained.

Trying each other by very moderate standaids and
measurements, there is great mutual complacency. ' The
eldest boy does not get an appointment in college, —
they never expected he would ; but he was a respectable
scholar, and they receive him with acclamations such
as another family would bestow on a valedictorian.
The daughters do not profess, as we are told, to draw
like artists, but some very moderate performances in
the line of the fine arts are dwelt on with much inno-
cent pleasure. They thrum a few tunes on the piano,
and the whole family listen and approve. All unite in
sino-ins:, in a somewhat discordant and uncultured man-
ner, a few psalm- tunes or songs, and take more comfort in

168 LITTLE FOXES.

them than many amateurs do in their well-execnted
peifoiTaances.

So goes the world with the Day tons; and when you
visit them, if you often feel that you could ask more
and suggest much improvement, yet you cannot help en-
joying the quiet satisfaction which breathes around you.

Now right across the way from the Daytons live the
Mores; and the Mores are the very opposites of the
Daytons.

Everything about their establishment is brought to
the highest point of culture. The carriage-drive never
shows a weed, the lawn is velvet, the flower-beds ever
blooming, the fruit-trees and vines grow exactly like
the patterns in the best pomological treatises. Within
doors the housekeeping is faultless, — all seems to be
moving in time and tune, — the table is more than good,
it is superlative, — every article is in its way a model, —
the children appear to you to be growing up after the
most patent-right method, duly trained, snipped, and
cultured, like the pear-trees, and grape-vines. Nothing
is left to accident, or done without much laborious
consideration of the best manner of doing it ; and the
consequences, in the eyes of their simple unsophisticated
neighbours, are very Avonderful.

Nevertheless, this is not a happy famil}'. All their
perfections do not begin to afford them one tithe of the
satisfaction that the Daxtons derive from their rasixed

•J DO

and scrambling performances.

The two daughters, Jane and Maria, had naturally
very sweet voices, and when they were little, trilled

EXACTINGNESS. 169

tunes in a very pleasant and bird -like manner. But
now, having been instructed by the best masters, and
heard the very first artists, they never sing or play ;
the piano is shut, and their voices are dumb. If you
request a song, they tell you that they never sing now ;
papa has such an exquisite taste, he takes no interest in
any common music ; in short, having heard Jenny
Lind, Grisi, Alboni, Mario, and others of the tuneful
shell, this family have concluded to abide in silence.
As to any music that they could make, it isn't to be
thought of.

For the same reason, the daughters, after attending, for
a quarter or two, the drawing exercises of a celebrated
teacher, threw up their pencils in disgust, and tore up
very pretty and agreeable sketches which were the
marvel of their good-natured, admiring neighbours. If
they could draw like Signer Scratchalini, if they could
hope to become perfect artists, they tell you they
would have persevered ; but they have taken lessons
enough to learn that drawing is the labour of a life-
tnne, and, not having a life-time to give to it, they
resolve to do nothing at all.

They have also, for a similar reason, given up letter-
writing. If their chirography were as elegant as
Charlotte Cushman's, — if they were perfect mistresses
of polite English, — if they were gifted with w*it,
humour, and fancy, like the first masters of style, —
they would take pleasure in epistolary composition, and
be good correspondents ; but anything short of that is
so intolerable, that, except in cases of life and death or

170 LITTLE FOXES.

urgent business, you cannot get a line out of them.
Yet they write very fair, agreeable, womanly letters,
and would write much better ones, if they allowed
themselves a little more practice.

Mrs. More is devoured by care. She sits with a
clouded brow in her elegant, well-regulated house ; and
when you talk with her, you are surprised to learn that
everything in it is in the most dreadful disorder from
one end to the other. Y(ju ask for particulars, and find
that the disorder has relation to exquisite standards of
the ways of doing things, derived from obsei'vation of
life in the most subdivided state of European service, — •
to all of which she has not as yet been able to raise her
domestics. You compliment her on her cook, and she
responds, in plaintive accents, " She can do a few
things decently, but she is nothing of a cook." You
refer with enthusiasm to her bread, her coffee, her
muffins and hot rolls, and she listens and sighs. " Yes,"
she admits, " these are eatable, — not bad ; but you
should have seen the rolls at a certain cafe in Paris, and
the bread at a certain nobleman's in England, where
the}' had a bakery in the castle, and a French baker,
who did nothing at all but refine and perfect the idea
of bread. A\ hen she thinks of these things, every-
thing in comparison is so coarse and rough ! — but
then she has learned to be comfortable." Thus, in
every department of housekeepmg, to tliis too-well
instructed person,

" Hills peep o'er liills, and Alps on Alps arise."

EXACTINGNESS. 171

Not a thing in her wide and apparently beautifully-kept
establishment is ever done well enough to elicit from
her more than a sigh of toleration. " I suppose it must
do," she faintly breathes, when poor human nature,
having tried and tried again, evidently has got to the
boundaries ot its capabilities ; " you may let it go,
Jane ; I never expect to be suited.'*

The poor woman, in the midst of possessions and
attainments which excite the envy of her neighbours, is
utterl}^ restless and wretched, and feels herself always
baffled and unsuccessful. Her exacting nature makes
her dissatisfied with herself in everything that she
undertakes, and equally dissatisfied with others. In
the whole family there is little of that pleasure which
comes from the consciousness of mutual admiration and
esteem, because each one is pitched to so exquisite
a tone that each is afraid to touch another for fear of
making discord. They are afraid of each other every-
M'here. They cannot sing to each other, play to each
other, write to each other ; they cannot even converse
together with any freedom, because each knows that
the others are so dismally well-informed and critically
instructed.

Though all agree in a secret contempt for their
neighbours over the way, as living in a most heathenish
state of ignorant contentment, yet it is a fact that the
elegant brother John will often, on the sly, slip into the
Daytons' to spend an evening, and join them in singing
glees and catches to their old rattling piano, and have a
jolly time of it, which he remembers in contrast with

172 LITTLE FOXES.

the (lull, silent hours at home. Kate Dayton has an
uncultivated voice, which often falls from pitch; but
she has a perfectly infectious gaiety of good nature, and
when she is once at the piano, and all join in some
merry troll, he begins to think that there may be
something better even than good singing ; and then
the}' have dances and charades and games, all in such
Contented, jolly, impromptu ignorance of the unities of
time, place, and circumstance, that he sometimes doubts,
where ignorance is such bliss, whether it isn't in truth
folly to be wise.

Jane and Maria laugh at John for his partiality to
the Daytons, and yet they themselves feel the same
attraction. At the Daytons' they, somehow, find them-
selves heroines; their drawings are so admired, their
singing is so charming to these uncultured ears, that
they are often beguiled into giving pleasure with their
own despised acquirements ; and Jane, somehow, is
very tolerant of the devoted attention of Will Dayton,
a joyous, honest-hearted fellow, whom, in her heart of
hearts, she likes none the worse for being unexacting
and simple enough to think her a wonder of taste and
accomplishments. Will, of course, is the fui-thest pos-
sible from the Admirable Crichtons and exquisite Sir
Philip Sidney's whom Mrs. More and the young ladies
talk up at their leisure, and adorn with feathers from
every royal and celestial bird, when tbey are dis-
cussing ideal, possible husbands. He is not in any
way distinguished, excej^t for a kind heart, strong
native good sense, and a manly energy that has carried

EXACTINGNESS. 173

him straight into the very heart of many a citadel of
life, before which the superior and more refined Mr.
John had set himself down to deliberate upon the best
and most elegant way of taking it. Will's plain,
homel}^ intelligence has often in five minutes disen-
tangled some ethereal snarl in which these exquisite
Mores had spun themselves up, and brought them to
his own way of thinking by that sort of disenchanting
process which honest, practical sense sometimes exerts
over ideality.

The fact is, however, that in each of these families
there is a natural defect, which requires something
from the other to remedy it. Taking happiness as
the standard, the Daytons have it as against the
Mores. Taking attainment as the standard, the Mores
have it as against the Da3'tons. A portion of the dis-
contented ideality of the IMores would stimulate the
Daytons to refine and perfect many things which
might easily be made better, did they care enough
to have them so ; and a portion of the Daytons' self-
satisfied contentment would make the attainments and
refinements of the Mores of some practical use in
advancing their own happiness.

But between these two classes of natures lies another,
to which has been given an equal share of ideality, — in
which tlie conception and the desire of excellence are
equally strong, but in which a discriminating common
sense acts like a balance-wheel in machinery. AVhat is
the reason that the most exacting idealists never make
themselves unhappy about not being able to fly like a

174 LITTLE FOXES.

bird or swim like a fish ? Because common sense
teaches them that these accomplishments are so utterly
out of the question, that they never arise to the mind as
objects of desire. In these well-balanced minds we
speak of, common-sense runs an instinctive line all
through life between the attainable and the unattainable,
and sets the key of desire accordingly.

Common sense teaches that there is no one branch of
human art or science in which perfection is not a point
for ever receding. A botanist gravely assures us that to
become perfect in the knowledge of one branch of sea-
weeds would take all the time and strength of a man
for a life-time. There is no limit to music, to the fine
arts. There is never a time when the gardener can rest,
saying that his garden is perfect. Housekeeping, cook-
ing, sewing, knitting, may all, for aught we kno"w, be
pushed on for ever, without exhausting the capabilities
for doing better.

But while attainment in everything is endless, cir-
cumstances forbid the greater part of human beings
attaining, in any direction, the half of what they see
would be desirable ; and the diflerence between the
miserable idealist and the contented realist often is not
that both do not see what needs to be done for perfec-
tion, but that, seeing it, one is satisfied with the attain-
able, and the other for ever frets and wears himself out
on the unattainable.

The principal of a large and complicated public
institution was complimented on maintaining such
uniformity of cheerfulness amid such a diversity of

EXACTINGNESS. 175

cares. " I've made up my mind to be satisfied, when
things are done half as well as I would have them," was
his answer, and the same philosophy would apply with
cheering results to the domestic sphere.

There is a saying which one often hears among
common people, that such and such a one are persons
who never could be happy, unless everything went
'■''jast so,'' — that is, in accordance with their highest
conceptions.

When these persons are women, and undertake the
sway of a home empire, they are sure to be miserable,
and to make others so ; for home is a place where, by
no kind of magic possible to woman, can everything be
always made to go " just so."

We may read treatises on education, — and very excel-
lent ones there are. \\'e may read ver}^ nice stories
illustrating home management, in which book-children
and book-servants all work into the author's plan with
obliging unanimity ; but every real child and real
servant is an uncompromising fact, whose working into
our ideal of life cannot be predicted with any degree of
certainty. A husband is another absolute fact, of whose
conformity to any ideal conceptions no positive account
can be given. So, when a person has the most charm-
ing theories of education, the most complete ideals of
life, it is often his lot to sit bound hand and foot, and
see them all trampled under the heel of oj)posing circum-
stances.

Nothing is easier than to make an ideal garden. We
lay out our grounds, dig, plant, transplant, manure.

17G LITTLE FOXES.

AYe read catalocrues of roses till we arc bewildered with
their lustrous glories. We set our plum, pear, and
peach ; we luxuriate, in advance, on bushels of choicest
grapes, and our theoretic garden is Paradise IJegained.
But in the actual garden there are cut worms for every
cabbage, squash -bugs for all the melons, slugs and rose-
bugs for the roses, curculios for the plums, fire-blight
for pears, yellows for peaches, mildew for grapes, and
late and early frosts, droughts, winds, and hail-storms
here and there for all.

The garden and the family are fair pictures of each
other. Both are capable of the most ravishing repre-
sentations on paper; and the rules and directions for
creating beauty and perfection in both, can be made so
apparentl}' plain that he who runneth may read, and it
would seem that a fool need not err therein ; and yet
the actual results are always halting miles away behind
expectation and desire.

It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happi-
ness, if people would begin the concert of life with their
instruments tuned to a very low pitch : they who
receive the most happiness are generally they who
demand and expect the least.

Ideality often becomes an insidious mental and moral
disease, acting all the more subtly from its alliances with
what is highest and noblest within us. Shall we not
aspire to be perfect? Shall we be content with low
measures and low standards in anything? To these
inquiries there seems of course to be but one answer ;
yet the individual driven forward in blind, unreasoning

EXACTINGNESS. 177

aspiration, becomes wearied, bewildered, discontented,
restless, fretful, and miserable.

An unhappy person can never make others happy.
The creators and governors of a home, who are them-
selves restless and inharmonious, cannot make harmony
and peace. This is the secret reason why many a pure,
good, conscientious person is only a source of uneasiness
in family-life. They are exacting, discontented, un-
happy ; and spread the discontent and unhappiness
about them. They are, to begin with, on poor terms
with themselves ; they do not like themselves ; they
do not like their own appearance, manners, education,
accomplishments ; on all these points they try them-
selves by ideal standards, and find themselves wanting.
In morals, in religion, too, the same introverted scrutiny
detects only errors and evils, till all life seems to them
a miserable, hopeless failure, and they wish they had
never been born. They are angry and disgusted with
themselves ; there is no self-tol oration or self-endurance.
And persons in a chronic quarrel with themselves are
veiy apt to quarrel with others. That exacting nature
which has no patience with one's own inevitable fi'ailtics
and errors has none for those of others ; and thus tlie
great motive by which Christianity enforces tolerance
of the faults of others, loses its hold. There are people
who make no allowances either for themselves or any-
body else, but are equally angry and disgusted with
both.

Now it is important that tliose finely-strung natures
in which ideality largely predominates should begin

178 LITTLE FOXES.

life by a religious care and restraint of this faculty. As
the case often stands, however, religion only intensifies
the difficulty, by adding stringency to exaction and
censoriousness, driving the subject up with an unremit-
ting strain, till the very cords of reason sometimes snap.
Yet, properly understood and used, religion is the only
cure for the evil of diseased ideality. The Christian
religion is the only one that ever proposed to give to
all human beings, however various the range of their
nature and desires, the great underlying gift of 7X'st.
Its Author, with a strength of assurance which only
supreme divinity can justify, promises rest to all per-
sons, under all circumstances, with all sorts of natures,
all sorts of wants, and all sorts of defects. The in-
vitation is as wide as the human race : " Come unto
nie, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will
give 3"ou REST."

Kow this is the more remarkable, as this gracious
promise is accompanied by the presentation of a standard
of perfection which is more ideal and exacting than any
other that has ever been placed before mankind, —
which, in so many words, sets up absolute perfection
as the only true goal of aspiration.

The problem which Jesus proposes to human nature
is endless aspiration steadied by endless j)6ace, — a
perfectly restful, yet unceasing effort after a good which
is never to be attained till we attain a higher and more
perfect form of existence. It is because this problem is
insolvable by any human wisdom, that He says that
they who tuke His yoke upon them must learn of Him,

I»

EXACT INGNESS. 179

for He alone can make the perfect yoke easy, and its
burden light.

The first lesson in this benignant school mnst lie like
a strong, broad foundation under every structure on
which we wish to rear a happy life, — and that is, that
the full gratification of the faculty of ideality is never
to be expected in this present stage of existence, but is
to be transferred to a future life. Ideality, with its in-
cessant, restless longings and yearnings, is snubbed and
turned out of doors by human philosophy, when philo-
sophy becomes middle-aged and sulky with repeated
disappointments, — it is be-rated as a cheat and a liar, —
told to hold its tongue and take itself elsewhere ; but
Christianity bids it be of good cheer, still to aspire and
hope and prophesy, and points to a future where all its
dreams shall be outdone by reality.

A full faith in such a perfect future — a perfect faith
that God has planted in man no desire which he cannot
train to complete enjoyment in that future — gives the
mind rest and contentment to postpone for a while grati-
fications that will certainl}^ come at last.

Such a faith is better even than that native philoso-
phical good sense which restrains the ideal calculations
and hopes of some; for it has a wider scope and a
deeper power.

AVe have seen, in onr time, a woman gifted with all
those faculties which rejoice in the refinements of
society, dispensing the elegant hospitalities of a boun-
tiful home — jo^'ful and giving joy. A sudden reverse
has swept all this away ; the wealth on which it was

180 LITTLE FOXES.

based has melted like a fog-bank in a warm morning,
and we have seen her with her little family beginning
life again in the log-cabin of a Western settlement. ^\ o
have seen her sitting in the door of the one room that
took the place of parlour, bed-room, and nursery, cheer-
fully making her children's morning toilette by the
help of the one tin wash-bowl that takes the place of
her well-arranged bathing and dressing-rooms ; and yet,
as she twined their curls over her fingers, she had a
laugh and a jest and cheerful word for all. The few
morning-glories that she was training over her rude
porch seemed as much a source of delight to her as her
former green-house and garden ; and the adjustment of
the one or two shelves whereon were the half-dozen
books left of the library, her huisband's private papers,
and her own and her children's wardrobes, was entered
into daily with a zealous interest as if she had never
known a wider sphere.

Such facility of accommodation to life's reverses is
sometimes supposed to be merely the result of a hope-
ful and cheerful temperament ; in this case it was
purely the work of religion. In early life, this same
woman had been the discontented slave of ideality, had
sighed with vain longings in the midst of real and sub-
stantial comfort, had felt even the creasing of the rose-
leaves of her pillow an intolerable annoyance. Now
she has resigned herself to the work and toil of life as
the soldier does to the duties of the camp, satisfied to
do and to bear, enjoying with a free heart the small
daily pleasures which spring up like wild-fluwers amid

EXACTINGNESS. 181

daily toils and annoj^ances, and looking to tlie end of
the campaign for rest and congenial scenes.

This woman has within her the powers and gifts of
an artist ; hut her pencils and her colours are resolutely
laid away, and she sits hour after hour darning her
children's stockings, and turning and arranging a scant}--
wardrobe which no ingenuity can make more than
decent. She was a beautiful musician ; but a musical
instrument is now a thing of the past ; she only lulls
her baby to sleep with snatches of the songs which
used to form the attraction of brilliant salons. She
feels that a world of tastes and talents are lying dor-
mant in her while she is doing the daily work of a
nurse, cook, and seamstress ; but she remembers Who
took upon Him the form of a servant before her, and
she has full faith that her beautiful gifts, like bulbs
sleeping under ground, shall come up and blossom
again in that fair future which He has promised.
Therefore it is that she has no sighs for the present
or the past, — no quarrel with her life, or her lot in it ;
she is in harmony with herself and with all around
her ; her husband looks upon her as a fair daily
miracle, and her children rise up and call her blessed.

But, having laid the broad foundation of faith in a
better life, as the basis on which to ground our present
happiness, we who are of the ideal nature must pro-
ceed to build thereon wisely.

In the first place, we must cultivate the duty of self-
patience and se^f-toleration. Of all the religionists and
moralists who ever taught, Fenelon is the only one who

182 LITTLE FOXES.

has distinctly formulated the duty which a self-educator
owes to himself Have patience with yourself is a
direction often occurring in his writings, and a most
important one it is, — because patience with ourselves
is essential if we would have patience with others. Let
ns look through the world. A\ ho are the people easiest
to he pleased, most sunny, most urbane, most tolerant?
Are they not persons, from constitution and tempera-
ment, on good terms with themselves, — j)eople who do
not ask much of themselves or try themselves severely,
and who, therefore, are in a good humour for looking
upon others ? But how is a person w^ho is conscious of
a hundred daily faults and errors to have patience with
himself? The question may be answered by asking,
AVhat would you say to a child who fretted, scolded,
dashed down his slate, and threw his book on the floor,
because he made mistakes in his arithmetic ? You would
say, of course, " You are but a learner; it is not to be
expected that ^^ou will not make mistakes ; all children
do. Have patience." Just as you would talk to that
child, talk to yourself. Be reconciled to a lot of in-
evitable imperfection ; be content to try continually,
and often to fail. Jt is the inevitable condition of
human existence, and is to be accepted as such. A
patient acceptance of mortifications and of defeats of
our life's labour is often more efficacious for our moral
advancement than even our victories.

In the next place, w^e must school ourselves not to
look with restless desire to degrees of excellence in any
department of life which circuuistances evidently forbid

EXACTINGNESS. 1S3

our attaining. For a woman with plenty of money
and plenty of well-trained servants to be content to
have fly-specked windows, or littered rooms, or a slo-
venly-ordered table, is a sin. But in a woman in feeble
health, encumbered with a flock of restless little ones,
and whose circumstances allow her to keep but one
servant, it may be a piece of moral heroism to shut her
eyes on many such things, while securing mere essen-
tials to life and health. It may be a virtue in her not
to push neatness to such lengths as to wear herself out,
or to break down her only servant, and to be resigned to
have her tastes and preferences for order, cleanliness,
and beauty crossed, as she would resign herself to any
other affliction. Ko purgatory can be more severe to
people of a thorough and exact nature than to be so
situated that they can only half do everything they
undertake ; yet such is the fiery trial to which many a
one is subjected. Life seems to drive them along
without giving them time for anything ; everything is
a ragged, hasty performance, of which the mind most
keenly sees and feels the raggedness and hastiness.
Even one thing done as it really ought to be done,
would be a rest and refreshment to the soul ; but no-
where, in anj'- department of its undertakings, is there
any such thing to be perceived.

But there are cases where a great deal of wear and
tear can be saved to the nerves by a considerate making
up of one's mind as to how much, in certain circum-
stances, had better be undertaken at all. Let the circum-
stances of life be surveyed, the objects we are pursuing
arranged and counted, and see if there are not things

184 LITTLE FOXES.

here and there that may be thrown out of our plans
entirely, that others may be better executed.

What if the whole care of expensive table luxuries,
like cake and preserves, be thrown out of a house-
keeper's budget, in order that the essential articles of
cookery may be better prepared? A\ hat if ruffling,
embroidery, and the entire department of kindred fine
arts be thrown out of her calculations in providing for
the clothing of a family ? Many a feeble woman has
died of too much ruffling, as she patiently sat uj) night
after night sewing the thread of a precious, invaluable
life into elaborate articles which her children were
none the healthier or more virtuous for wearing.

Ideality is constantly ramif^'ing and extending the
department of the toilette and the needle into a world
of work and worry, wherein distracted women wander
up and down, seeing no end anywhere. The sewing-
machine was announced as a relief to these toils ; but
has it proved so ? We trow not. It only amounts to
this, — that now there can be seventy-two tucks on
each little petticoat, instead of fifteen, as before, and
that twice as many garments are made up and held to
be necessary as formerly. The women still sew to the
limit of human endurance; and still the old proverb
holds good, that woman's work is never done.

In the matter of dress, much wear and tear of spirit
and nerves may be saved by not beginning to go in
certain directions, well knowing that they will take us
beyond our resources of time, strength, and money.

There is one word of fear in the vocabulary of the

EXACTINGNESS. 185

women of our time, which must be pondered advisedly,
— TRIMMING. In old times a good garment was enough ;
now-a-days a garment is nothing without trimming.
Everything, from the first article that the baby wears
up to the elaborate dress of the bride, must be trimmed
at a rate that makes the trimming more than the origi-
nal article. A dress can be made in a day, but it cannot
be trimmed under two or three days. Let a faithful,
conscientious woman make up her mind how much of
all this burden of life she will assume, remembering
wisely that there is no end to ideality in anything, and
that the only way to deal with many perplexing parts
of life is to leave them out altogether.

Mrs. Kirkland, in her very amusing account of her
log-cabin experiences, tells us of the great disquiet and
inconvenience she had in attempting to arrange in her
lowly abode, a most convenient clothes-press, which was
manifestly too large for the establishment. Having
laboured with the cumbersome convenience for a great
length of time, and with much discomfort, she at last
resigned the ordering of it to a brawny-armed damsel
of the forest, who began by pitching it out of doors,
with the comprehensive remark, that, " where there
wasn't room for a thing, there wasn't."

The wisdom which inspired the remark of this
nistic maiden might have saved the lives of many
matrons, who have worn themselves out in vain
attempts to make comforts and conveniences out of
things which they had better have thrown out of
doors altogether.

18G LITTLE FOXES.

True, it requires some judgment to know what,
among objects commonly pursued in any department,
we really ought to reject ; and it requires independence
and steadiness to say, " I will not begin to try to do
certain things that others are doing, and that, perhaps,
they expect of me ;" but there comes great leisure and
quietness of spirit from the gaps thus made. When the
unwieldy clothes-press was once cast out, everj^thing in
the log-cabin could have room.

A mother, who is anxiously trying to reconcile the
watchful care and training of her little ones with the
maintenance of fashionable calls and parties, maj'' lose
her life in the effort to do both, and do both in so
imperfect a manner as never to give her a moment's
peace. But on the morrow after she comes to the
serious and Christian resolve, " The training of my
children is all that I can do well, and henceforth it
shall be my sole object," there falls into her tumultuous
life a Sabbath pause of peace and leisure. It is true
that she is still doing a work in which absolute perfec-
tion ever recedes ; but she can make relative attainments
far nearer the standard than before.

Lastly, under the head of ideality, let us resolve to be
satisfied with our own past doings, when at the time of
doing we used all the light God gave us and did all in
our power.

The backward action of ideality is often full as tor-
menting as its forward and prospective movements.
The moment a thing is done and over, (me would think
that good sense would lead us to drop it like a stone into

EXACTTNGNESS. 187

the ocean ; but tlie morbid idealist cannot cut loose
from the past.

*' Was that, after all, the hest thing ? Would it not
have been better so or so?" And the self tormented
individual lies wakeful, during weary night-hours, re-
volving a thousand possibilities, and conjuring up a
thousand vague perhapses. " If I had only done so,
now, perhaps this result would have followed, or that
would not ;" and as there is never any saying but that
so it might have turned out, the labyrinth and the dis-
content are alike endless.

Now there is grand good sense in the Apostle's direc-
tion, "Forgetting the things that are behind, jDress
forward." The idealist should charge himself, as with
an oath of God, to let the past alone as an accomplished
fact, solely concerning himself with the inquiry, " Did
I not do the best I then knew how ?"

The maxim of the Quietists is, that, when we have
acted according to the best light we have, we have ex-
pressed the will of God under those circumstances, —
since, had it been otherwise, more and different light
would have been given us ; and with the will of God
done by ourselves as by Himself, it is our duty to be
content.

Having written thus far in my article, and finding
nothing more at hand to add to it, I went into the par-
lour to read it to Jennie and Mrs. Crowfield. I found
the former engaged in the task of binding sixty jards
of quilling, (so I think she called it,) which were abso-

]8S LITTLE FOXES.

lutely necessaiy for perfecting a dress : and the latter
was braiding one of seven little petticoats, stamped with,
elaborate patterns, ^vhich she had taken from Marianne,
because that virtuous matron was ruining her eyes
and health in a blind push to get them done before
October.

Both approved and admired my piece, and I thought
of Saint Anthony's preaching to the fishes : —

" Tlie sermon once ended,
The good man descended,
And the pikes went on stealing.
The eels went on eeling,
The crabs were backsliders,
The stockfish thicksiders :
Much delighted were they,
But went on their own way."'

THE END.

LONUOS : riUNTED BY Wir.r.IAM Cr/IWRS AND «OXS, ?rAlIFOia> FTKICET
AM> OUAUINO CliUbS,

BELL & DALDY, 186, FLEET STBEET.

Bell and Daldy's Pocket Volumes.

A Series of Select Works of Favourite Authors, adapted for general
reading, moderate in price, compact and elegant in fuim, and exe-
cuted in a style fitting them to be permanently preserved. Im-
perial 32mo.

Now Beady.

Burns's Poems. 2s. 6d,

Songs. 2s. 6d,

Coleridge's Poems. 25. 6d.

Sea Songs and Ballads. By Charles Dibdin and others. 25. 6d.

The Midshipman. — Autobiographical Sketches of his own
early Career, by Capt. Basil Hall, R.N., F.R.S. From bis " Frag-
ments of Voyages and Travels." 3s.

The Lieutenant and Commander. Ditto, ditto. 3s.

George Herbert's Poems. 2s.

Remains. Is. 6d.

Works. 3s.

"Washington Irving's Sketch Book. 3s.

Lamb's Tales from Shakspeare. 2s. 6d.

Longfellow's Poems. 2s. 6d.

Milton's Paradise Lost. 2s. 6d.

Eegained, and other Poems. 2s. 6d.

The Eobin Hood Ballads. 2s. 6d.

Southey's Life of Nelson. 2s. Qd.

Walton's Complete Angler. Portraits and Illustrations. 2s. 6d.

Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, &c. 3s.

White's Natural History of Selborne. os.

In cloth, top edge gilt, at 6d. per volume extra ; in half morocco,
Eoxbuigh style, at Is. extra ; in antique or best plain morocco, at -is. 6d.
extra.

Preparing.
Goldsmith's Poems.
■ Vicar of Wakefield.

Gray's Poems.

Henry Vaughan's Poems.
And others.

BELL ,{: DJLDY, 186, FLEET STREET.

Bell and Daldy's
Elzevir Series of Standard Authors.

Small feap. 8vo.
. Messrs. Bi:ll and Daldy, liaviiii;^ ht-en favoured with many requests
that their Poc-ket Volumes should he is.su( d in a laru^er size, so as to
be more suitable for Presents and Sehnol Prizes, have dettrmined upon
printing New Editions in aecordance with these sugu^estions.

They will be issued under the general title of " Elzevir Series," to
distinguish them from their other colleetinns. This general title has
been adopted to indicate the spirit in which they will be prepared; tliat
is to say, with the greatest possible accuracy as regards text, and the
highest degree of beauty that can be attained in the workmanship.

They will be printed at tlie Cliiswick Press, on tine paper, with rich
margins, and will be issued in tasteful binding at prices varying from
3s. 6d. to 68.

Most of the Volumes already published in the " Pocket VoLrMES "
will be issued in this Series, and others of a similar character will bo
added. Some will contain a highly-tinished Portrait, or other Illus-
tration.

Beady.

Longfellow's Poems. 4s. Gd.

• — Song of Hiawatha, and the Golden Legends.

(Shortly.)

Spanish Student, and Later Poems. (Shortl>/.)

Burns's Poems. 45. 6d. \ Tlds edition contains all the copyright

Sony's. 4s. 6d. [ pieces published in the Aldine Edition.

Coleridge's Poems. 4s. Qd.

Shakspeare's Plays. Carefully edited by Thomas Keight-

ley. In Six Voliunes. 5s. each.
Walton's Angler. 4s. M.

Lives of Donne, Hooker, Herbert, &c. os.

Irving's Sketch Book. 5s.

Tales of a Traveller. 5s.

Milton's Paradise Lost. 5s.
Kegained. 5s.

The Library of English Worthies.

A Series of reprints of the best Authors, carefully edited and collated

with the Early Copies, and handsomely printed by Whittingham

in Octavo.

Bishop Butler's Anah^gy of Peligion ; with Analytical

Index, by the Kev. Edwuni Steere, EE.D. 12s. Antique calf,' 1/. Is.

" The present edition luis been fnrnisbed with an Index of tlie Texts of

Scripture quoted, and an Index of ^\^irds and 1 iiings considerably fuller than

any liltherlo pubiiahed." — Lditor's I'rtjace,

BELL & DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET.

Gower's Confessio Amantis, with Life by Dr. Paiili, and a
Glossary. 3 vols. 11. 2s. Antique calf, 3/. 6s. Only a limited
number of Copies printed.

This important ivork is so scarce that it can seldom he met with
even in large libraries. It is wanting in nearly every collection of
English Poetry.

Herbert's Poems and Eemains; with S. T. Coleridge's
Notes, and Life by Izaak Walton. Kevised, with additional Notes,
by Mr. J. Yeowell. 2 vols. 11. Is. Morocco, antique calf or
morocco, 21. 2s.

Spenser's Complete Works ; with Life, Notes, and Glos-
sary, by John Payne Collier, Esq., F.S.A. 5 vols. '6l. 15s.
Antique calf, 61. 6s.

Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Eule and Exercises of Holy Living
and Dying. 2 vols. ll. Is. Morocco, antique calf or morocco,
21. 2s.

Uniform with the above.

The Physical Theoiy of Another Life. By Isaac Taylor,
Esq., Author of " Logic in Theology," " Ultimate Civilization," &c.
New Edition. 10s. 6d. Antique calf, 21s.

The Aldine Edition of the British Poets.

The Publishers have been induced, by the scarcity and increasing value
of this admired Series of the Poets, to prepare a New Edition, very
carefully corrected, and improved by such additions as recent
literary research has placed within their reach. Fcp. Svo.

Akenside's Poetical Works, with Memoir by the Eev.
A. Dyce, and additional Letters, carefully revised. 5s. Morocco,
or antique morocco, 10s. 6d.

CoUins's Poems, with Memoir and Notes by W. Moy
Thomas, Esq. 3s. 6d. Morocco, or antique morocco, 8s. 6d.

Cowper's Poetical Works, including his Translations.
Edited, with Memoir, by John Bruce, Esq., F.S.A. 3 vols.

[^Li the Press.

Dry den's Poetical Works, with Memoir by the Eev. E.
Hooper, F.S.A. Carefully revised. 5 vols. 5s. each.

Graj^'s Poetical W^orks, with Kotes and Memoir by the
Rev. John IMitford. 5s. Morocco, or antique morocco, 10s. 6d.

Shakespeare's Poems, with Memoir by the Eev. A. Dyce.

5s. Morocco, or antique morocco, 10s. 6d.

BELL cO DALBY, 180, FLEET STREET.

Thomson's Poems, with Memoir by Sir H. Nicolas, anno-
tutud by Peter Cunningham, Esq., F.S.A., and additional Poems,
carefully revised. 2 vols. 10s. Morocco, or antique morocco,
II. Is.

Seasons, and Castle of Indolence, with Memoir.

(js. Morocco, or antique morocco, lis. GcZ.

Kirke A\'hite's Poems, with Memoir by Sir H. Nicolas, and
additional Notes. Carefully revised. 58. Morocco, or antique
morocco, 10s. Qd.

Young's Poems, with Memoir by the Eev. John ]Mitford,
and additional Poems. 2 vols. 10s. Morocco, or antique mo-
rocco, H. Is.

Books uniform with the Aldine Edition of the Poets.

The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus.

Translated by Geor<::e Long. Qs.

Bacon's Advancement of Learning. Edited, with short
Notes, by the Eev. G. W. Kitchin, M.A., Christ Church, Oxford.
6s, Antique calf, lis. Qd.

' Essays ; or, Counsels Civil and Moral, with the

Wisdom of the Ancients. With Keferences and Notes by S. W.
Singer, F.S.A. 5s. Morocco, or antique calf, 10s. GcZ,

Novum Organum. Newly Translated, with short

Notes, by the Rev. Andrew Johnson, M.A. Qs. Antique calf,
lis. Qd.

Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion ; with Analytical
Introduction and copious Index, by the Rev. Dr. Steere. Gs.
Antique calf, lis. G(Z.

Complete Works; with Memoir by the Iiev. Dr.

Steere. 2 vols. 12s,

Sermons and Remains ; with Memoir by the Eev.

E. Steere, LL.D. Qs.

*»* This volume contains some additional remains, which are copyright, and
render it the most complete edition extant.

The Works of Gray, edited by the Eev. John Mitford.
With his Correspondence witli ]\[r. Cliute and others. Journal kept
at Rome, Criticism on the Sculptures, &c. New Edition, o vols,
\l. 5s.

The Temple and other Poems; by George Herbert, with
Coleridi^e's Notes. New Edition, 5s. IMorocco, antique calf or
morocco, 10s. G»i.

BELL & DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET.

I U

//77f^///z

HOME USE

CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT

MAIN LIBRARY

This book is due on the last date stamped below
l-month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405.
B-rontii loans may be recharged by bringing books

to Circulation Desk.
Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior

to due date.

ALL BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO RECALL 7 DAYS

AFTER DATE CHECKED OUT.

ROWBD

f ow, or
bcalh

julWTbt^

,,is^ ciR. ffflao"®

AUGllM

49Si

Ll)21 — A— 40m-12,'74
(S2700L)

General Library

University of California

Berkeley

X 31 ly or California

Berkeley

;,ro-.vri w^,»/^A.i4i*crM*/«>«/»^//^*'Avir/iv«<M««VAittwIta(»i#«ptti'Ji»H*OH>» ^ f.*rt»*M#«^^^

'■V .-■