of the present day, when they go for a summer vacation, take their sisters with them.  The act gives them their first true knowledge of the responsibilities attaching to the care of a woman—­to the gravity of married life.  It being cheaper, as a rule, for man and wife to travel together than for brother and sister, the brother has an idea of future expense awaiting him (after he shall have married) which is on the right side of an estimate—­that is, the surplus side.  The sister’s mind is broadened by this kindness and self-sacrifice of the brother.  She has a higher opinion of manhood, and her choice will fall all the higher up.  What makes our finest girls often go through the forest of maidenhood rejecting the most promising staffs of support, and, finally, nearing the plains of spinsterhood, pick up in a panic

THE CROOKEDEST STICK OF THE LOT?

It is mainly the brother’s fault.  He has not shown her how much of a man he himself can be, and she has not noticed the manly qualities of many of the admirers whom she has passed by in disdain.  A wise young woman should be on the lookout for gentleness and courage in man.  If she finds those qualities—­if she can only become aware they are there, her heart will relent in spite of her, and there will be no hesitancy in her final choice, nor regret in her final retrospect.

IN YOUR SISTER

you behold the exact complement of yourself.  Yourself and herself, brother and sister, are the links which your parents have left to hold their minds, their qualities, their aggregated development and progression, to the earth.  All that your parents were, yourself and your sister will perpetuate, adding the acquirements of your own lives.  You have in your sister an opportunity for self-study without its like or equal.  Where your sister is weak, there are you weak (naturally) also.  Your vanity may conceal the fact in your own nature, but her character will express it to you.

STRENGTHEN UP THESE POINTS.

As the calker goes through the hold of the ship, peering intently for light, or listening for the trickling of water, so should you, in observing your sister’s character and family peculiarities, find and calk up all the treacherous leaks in your own nature.  Her carelessness is your forgetfulness.  Mend it.  Her heedlessness is undoubtedly your recklessness.  Send out scouts.  Her impatience is possibly your high temper.  Hit yourself when you are in rage, and thus learn its folly.  I know of a man who once came within an inch of braining his fellow-soldier.  They were lying on the grass, when the fellow struck my friend a smart blow with the iron ramrod of a Springfield musket, all in fun, you know.  My friend was like Cowper, who wrote: 

The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves, by thumping on your back
His sense of your great merit,
Is such a friend as one had need
Be very much his friend, indeed,
To pardon or to bear it.