handsomer as they grow older.  There is no reason, there ought to be no reason, why women should not.  They will have a different kind of beauty, but it will be just as truly beauty and more impressive and attractive than the beauty of sixteen.  It is absurd to suppose that God has made women so that their glory passes away in half a dozen years.  It is absurd to suppose that thought and feeling and passion and purpose, all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a woman’s face for thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the end worse than they found it.  They found it a negative,—­mere skin and bone, blood and muscle and fat.  They can but leave their mark upon it, and the mark of good is good.  Pity does not have the same finger-touch as revenge.  Love does not hold the same brush as hatred.  Sympathy and gratitude and benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and carelessness and deceit.  All these busy little sprites draw their fine lines, lay on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny hands; the prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there is the consecration and the poet’s dream.

But such beauty is made, not born.  Care and weariness and despondency come of themselves, and groove their own furrows.  Hope and intelligence and interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch.  A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward.  She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow.  She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case.  The first, the most important trust which God has given to any one is himself.  To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the most of ourselves.  Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just tastes, is not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own fields to grow thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else’s garden-plot, keeping our charge.  Even were it possible for a mother to work well to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think she would be justified in doing it.  Her account is not complete when she says, “Here are they whom thou hast given me.”  She must first say, “Here am I.”  But when it is seen that suicide is also child-murder, it must appear that she is under doubly heavy bonds for herself.

Husbands, moreover, have claims, though wives often ignore them.  It is the commonest thing in the world to see parents tender of their children’s feelings, alive to their wants, indulgent to their tastes, kind, considerate, and forbearing, but to each other hasty, careless, and cold.  Conjugal love often seems to die out before parental love.  It ought not so to be.  Husband and wife should each stand first in the other’s estimation.  They have no right to forget each other’s comfort,