and enabled to do good work for souls, by the atmosphere which this woman created; every inmate of her house involuntarily looked into her face for the key-note of the day; and it always rang clear.  From the rose-bud or clover-leaf which, in spite of her hard housework, she always found time to put by our plates at breakfast, down to the essay or story she had on hand to be read or discussed in the evening, there was no intermission of her influence.  She has always been and always will be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker.  If to her quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been added the appliances of wealth and the enlargements of a wider culture, hers would have been absolutely the ideal home.  As it was, it was the best I have ever seen.  It is more than twenty years since I crossed its threshold.  I do not know whether she is living or not.  But, as I see house after house in which fathers and mothers and children are dragging out their lives in a hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleasant collision, I always think with a sigh of that poor little cottage by the seashore, and of the woman who was “the light thereof;” and I find in the faces of many men and children, as plainly written and as sad to see as in the newspaper columns of “Personals,” “Wanted,—­a home.”