Do you ever see a man look through a stack of mail, and notice that suddenly his face lights up as he seizes a letter “from home”?  He tears it open eagerly, his mouth up-curving at the corners, as he lingers over every word.  You know, without being told, that the wife he had to leave behind puts all the best she can devise and save for him into his life as well as on paper!

Do you ever see a man go through his mail and see him suddenly droop—­as, though a fog had fallen upon his spirits?  Do you see him reluctantly pick out a letter, start to open it, hesitate and then push it aside?  His expression says plainly:  “I can’t face that just now.”  Then by and by, when his lips have been set in a hard line, he will doggedly open his letter to “see what the trouble is now.”

If for once there is no trouble, he sighs with relief, relaxes, and starts the next thing he has to do.

Usually, though, he frowns, looks worried, annoyed, harassed, and you know that every small unpleasantness is punctiliously served to him by one who promised to love and to cherish and who probably thinks she does!

=THE LETTER EVERYONE LOVES TO RECEIVE=

The letter we all love to receive is one that carries so much of the writer’s personality that she seems to be sitting beside us, looking at us directly and talking just as she really would, could she have come on a magic carpet, instead of sending her proxy in ink-made characters on mere paper.

Let us suppose we have received one of those perfect letters from Mary, one of those letters that seem almost to have written themselves, so easily do the words flow, so bubbling and effortless is their spontaneity.  There is a great deal in the letter about Mary, not only about what she has been doing, but what she has been thinking, or perhaps, feeling.  And there is a lot about us in the letter—­nice things, that make us feel rather pleased about something that we have done, or are likely to do, or that some one has said about us.  We know that all things of concern to us are of equal concern to Mary, and though there will be nothing of it in actual words, we are made to feel that we are just as secure in our corner of Mary’s heart as ever we were.  And we finish the letter with a very vivid remembrance of Mary’s sympathy, and a sense of loss in her absence, and a longing for the time when Mary herself may again be sitting on the sofa beside us and telling us all the details her letter can not but leave out.

=THE LETTER NO WOMAN SHOULD EVER WRITE=

The mails carry letters every day that are so many packages of TNT should their contents be exploded by falling into wrong hands.  Letters that should never have been written are put in evidence in court rooms every day.  Many can not, under any circumstances, be excused; but often silly girls and foolish women write things that sound quite different from what, they innocently, but stupidly, intended.