is often concealed in splendor and often in extravagance.”  The tendency of people in comfortable circumstances to move out of a pleasant cottage into a brick house with two inches of marble-front is a sorrowful one.  We can progress only through this same sad tendency, but how many happy homes are thus ruined!  It requires much brains to count the ultimate cost.  There is hardly an article of furniture in the old home which does not look out of place in the new.  There is additional work to be done which had been entirely overlooked.  The servant is a grievious expense.  We do not get the result of her work—­only the profit.  If she earn the one hundred and fifty million dollars we get only the fifteen million dollars.  She must be “kept”—­must add her clothes to the wash, her meat to the dish, her bed-room to the house.  She breaks with a smile.  She scatters as the sower who goeth forth to sow.  From every conceivable cranny creep forth disbursements—­the expenses of the rich man creeping like tigers upon his poor but vainer neighbor.  O, pshaw! why will men and women do it?  If those two fine spirits, Prudence and Economy look down upon us, such houses must attract attention only by seeming to mark out upon the earth they cover the writing at Belshazzar’s feast—­

THE MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,

of the nineteenth century.  I know of an actual instance of a family being forced to eat the bread of charity within the walls of a house for which they had engaged to pay, and had so far paid, the sum of two thousand dollars a year as rent!  What foolish thing a vain human being will not do is a more difficult problem than what he will do.  If we had no rich people to fire up our self-conceit, we would be happier, though we rose more slowly; yet are we to be despised for being willing to throw the blame so freely from our shoulders.  “Poverty is,” says Cobbett, “except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real.  The shame of poverty—­the shame of being thought poor—­it is

A GREAT AND FATAL WEAKNESS,

though arising in this country from the fashion of the times themselves.”  Let us shake off this fatal weakness.  That man is a coward who, from whatever reason, keeps up the expenditure of a rich man a moment longer than his income will warrant it.

“POVERTY IS ONLY CONTEMPTIBLE

when it is felt to be so,” says Bovee.  “That man,” says Bishop Paley, “is to be accounted poor, of whatever rank he be, who suffers the pains of poverty, whose expenses exceed his resources; and no man, properly speaking, poor, but he.”  “The poor are only they who seem poor,” says Emerson, “and poverty consists in feeling poor.”  Doubtless you are familiar with the story of the unhappy Sultan to whom the Magi, traveling from the East to his relief, could give no hope unless he could get and wear the shirt of a happy man.  Proclamation went forth to all the lands of the empire, offering glittering rewards for a happy man.  At last learned doctors and experts, who had gone out into the outer regions, brought in a shepherd, who was vowed to be an entirely happy man.  But lo! when he came before the Magi, it was found that