place, and the old stove was left to burn out its fire at the last, that it, too, might be removed next morning.  And after the evening had come and was far spent, the last evening wherein any right should remain to us to enter the old home as its owners and occupants, I took my pass-key and slipped over from the neighbor’s for my final good-bye to the dear old home.  The fire-light, like the glance of a reproachful eye, shone upon me through the gloom of the deserted parlor.  “Have I not warmed you and comforted you and cheered you with my genial glow?” a voice seemed to say; “and now you have come to see me die!  I am the vital spirit of your home.  I am dying, and nothing can ever reanimate these deserted rooms again with the dear, the beautiful past.”

Like the eye of one who is going down to death, the firelight faded and finally went out in the pallor of ashes, while I, sitting alone in the darkness, felt the whole world drearier for a little space for the final extinguishment of this fire, the death hour of a once happy home.

XLVIII.

A talk about divorce.

Somebody asked me the other day if I favored divorce.  Like everything else in the world the matter depends largely upon special circumstance, but in the main I do not believe in divorce.  If husbands and wives cannot live together without quarreling, let them live apart, but they have no business to sever the bond that unites them.  The promise to take each other for “better or for worse” must be regarded in both readings of the clause.  If the “worse” comes along we have no right to ignore it because the “better” has failed.  If your husband is a drunkard, all the more reason for you to stand by him if you are a good woman.  If he is cruel and abusive, you need not put your life in danger by staying under his roof, but you need not throw him over and get another husband.  If he goes into the gutter, pull him out, and know that your experience is only a big dose of the “worse” you promised to take along with the “better.”  It is the quinine with the honey, and you have no right to reject it.  There are 10,000 things that work discord in married life that a little tact and forbearance would dissipate, as a steady wind will blow away gnats.  The trouble with all of us is, we make too much of trifles.  We nurse them, and feed them, and magnify them, until from gnats they grow to be buzzards with their beaks in our hearts.  Not for one sin, nor seven sins, nor seventy sins, forsake the friend you chose from all the world to make your own.  A good woman will save anything but a liar, and God’s grace is adequate, in time, for even him.  I say unto wives, be large-hearted, wide in your charity, generous, not paltry, nor exacting, (exaction has murdered more loves than Herod murdered babies!) companionable, forbearing and true, and stand by your husbands through everything.  And I say unto men, be men!