Of course you will spend all of your extra time at home.  That is what home is for.  Live in your home; do not merely eat and sleep there.  It is not a boarding-house, remember that.  Books are there, and music and a human sympathy and a marvelous care for you, under whose influence alone the soul of a young man grows into real grandeur, power, and beauty.  And be sure that you let each day have its play-hour.

“I would not care to live,” said one of the very ablest and most eminent members of the American Catholic priesthood—­“I would not care to live,” said he, “if I could not have my play-hour, music, and flowers.  They are God’s gifts and my necessity.  Every young man who has a home commits a crime if he does not each day bring one hour of joy into his household.”

The man who said that is not only brilliant and wise, but one of the most exalted souls it has ever been my fortune to know.  And his words have good sense in them, have they not?  Make that good sense yours, then.  Make a play-hour each day for yourself and wife and children.  I say children, for I assume, of course, that when you are making a new home you are making a home indeed.

Very well.  The absence of children is either unfortunate or immoral.  A purposely childless marriage is no marriage at all; it is merely an arrangement.  Robert Louis Stevenson calls it “a friendship recognized by the police.”  A house undisturbed and unglorified by the wailings and laughter of little ones is not a home—­it is a habitation.

There is in children a certain immortality for you.  Most of us believe in life after death; and that belief is a priceless possession of every human being who has it.  But even the man who has not this faith beholds his own immortality in his children.  “Why of course I am immortal,” said a scientist who believed that death ends all.  “Of course I am immortal,” said he, “there goes my reincarnation”; and he pointed to his little son, glorious with the promise of an exhaustless vitality.

There is no doubt at all that association with infancy and youth puts back the clock of time for each of us.  Besides all this, it is the natural life, and that is the only thing worth while.  The “simple life” is all right, and the “strenuous life” excellent.  The “artistic life” is charming, no doubt, and all the other kinds of “lives” have their places, I suppose.  I am interested in all of them.  But I am much more interested in the natural life.  That alone is truthful.  And, after all, only the truthful is important.

Get into the habit of happiness.  It is positively amazing how you can turn every little incident into a sunbeam.  And, mark you, it is quite as easy to take the other course.  But what a coward a man is who releases in his home all the pent-up irritability and disappointment of the day.

There is no sense in it, either.  It does not make you less black of spirit to fill your home with gloom.  You ought not to do it, even from the view-point of good health.  If you eat your meal in a sour silence which almost curdles the cream and scares your wife half to death, you do not and cannot digest your food.  If you have had a hard day, say to yourself, “Well, that was a hard day.  Now for some rest and some fun.”