After the explanations and exclamations of joy were over, all three were about to leave me; but, the cloth being laid, I added three more places, and kept them to breakfast.

The meal was prolonged:  the fare was only tolerable; but the over-flowings of affection made it delicious.  Never had I better understood the unspeakable charm of family love.  What calm enjoyment in that happiness which is always shared with others; in that community of interests which unites such various feelings; in that association of existences which forms one single being of so many!  What is man without those home affections, which, like so many roots, fix him firmly in the earth, and permit him to imbibe all the juices of life?  Energy, happiness—­do not all these come from them?  Without family life where would man learn to love, to associate, to deny himself?  A community in little, is it not this which teaches us how to live in the great one?  Such is the holiness of home, that, to express our relation with God, we have been obliged to borrow the words invented for our family life.  Men have named themselves the sons of a heavenly Father!

Ah! let us carefully preserve these chains of domestic union.  Do not let us unbind the human sheaf, and scatter its ears to all the caprices of chance and of the winds; but let us rather enlarge this holy law; let us carry the principles and the habits of home beyond set bounds; and, if it may be, let us realize the prayer of the Apostle of the Gentiles when he exclaimed to the newborn children of Christ:  “Be ye like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.”

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AN “ATTIC” PHILOSOPHER

(Un Philosophe sous les Toits)

By Emile Souvestre

BOOK 3.

CHAPTER X

OUR COUNTRY

October 12th, Seven O’clock A.M.

The nights are already become cold and long; the sun, shining through my curtains, no more wakens me long before the hour for work; and even when my eyes are open, the pleasant warmth of the bed keeps me fast under my counterpane.  Every morning there begins a long argument between my activity and my indolence; and, snugly wrapped up to the eyes, I wait like the Gascon, until they have succeeded in coming to an agreement.