The value of Time should never be so foolishly conceived as to urge a man or a woman to that hurry which shows a thing to be too big for him who undertakes it.  God makes Time.  Can you, then, add to it?  “Stay a while to make an end the sooner.”  You do not gain an hour by robbing yourself of your sleep.  You do not gain in force by enlarging the wheel that carries your belting.  If your constitution require eight hours’ sleep, then go to your bed at ten o’clock and rise like “the sun rejoicing in the east,” fresh-nerved and forceful, apt to carry all before you.  Do not encourage those tempters who come to you asking you to break into the storehouse of your vitality and rob yourself of two, three, and often four hours of your rest, leaving you, in the bankruptcy of after-life a trembling alarmist, subject to the replevins of rheumatic muscles and the reprisals of revengeful nerves.  Remember that age comes upon us like a snowstorm in the night, and that the mill will never grind with the water that has passed.  Time is the stern corrector of fools; “Wisdom walks before it, Opportunity with it, and Temperance behind it.  He that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends.”

[Illustration]

HOME.

     ’Tis sweet to hear the honest watchdog’s bark
       Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home;
     ’Tis sweet to know that there is an eye will mark
       Our coming, and look brighter when we come.—­Byron.

     An elegant sufficiency, content,
     Retirement, rural, quiet, friendship, books,
     Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
     Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven.—­Thomson.

     ’Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam,
     Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. 
      —­J.H.  Payne, in the Opera of “Clari.”

No word in the English language approaches in sweetness the sound of this group of letters.  Out of this grand syllable rush memories and emotions always chaste, and always noble.  The murderer in his cell, his heart black with crime, hears this word, and his crimes have not yet been committed; his heart is yet pure and free; in his mind he kneels at his mother’s side and lisps his prayers to God that he, by a life of dignity and honor, may gladden that mother’s heart; and then he weeps, and for a while is not a murderer.  The Judge upon his bench deals out the dreaded justice to the scourged, and has no look of gentleness.  But breathe this word into his ear, his thoughts fly to his fireside; his heart relents; he is no longer Justice, but weak and tender Mercy.

What makes that small, unopened missive so precious to that great rough man?  Why, ’tis from Home—­from Home, that spot to which his heart is tied with unseen cords and tendrils tighter than the muscles which hold it in his swelling chest.  Perhaps he left his Home caring little for it at the time.  Perhaps harsh necessity drove him from its tender roof to lie beneath