KINGS HAVE NO HOMES.

I am told that the Presidents of the United States have complained very naturally that they are denied that privacy which is accorded to the lowliest citizen in the land.  It should content the possessor of a Home that he has that which Kings cannot have, and which if it be bright and free from wrong, is more valuable than palaces and marble halls.  Of this golden right of asylum in the Home, Abraham Cowley has written:  “Democritus relates, as if he gloried in the good fortune of it, that when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him; and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus; after whose death, making, in one of his letters, a kind commemoration of the happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last that he thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life, that, in the midst of that most talked of and talking country in the world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without being heard of; and yet, within a very few years afterward, there were

NO TWO NAMES OF MEN MORE KNOWN

or more generally celebrated.  If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time; we expose our life to an ague of frigid impertinences which would make a wise man tremble to think of.”

What makes the remembrance of the old Home so happy?  Was it not because there the storms of life were turned away from us by those who bore the blasts to keep us in our innocence?  And now that future which then was on our horizon has neared us and is our zenith, the centre of our heavens.  About us are

PRATTLING LITTLE ONES

who in the far-off years will clothe this house about with that holy mantle which will give it the right to that same grand title, Home.  Can we not, in thinking of the good old Home, stand a little nearer to the blast and warm some tiny heart a little more?  Does the merry laugh sing out as it did in our own youth?  Then this is indeed a Home, growing each day more sacred in the mind of those fledglings who will so soon fly from the nest to beat a fluttering and a weary way through the tempests that will encompass them.  A Christmas-tree, a picnic, a May-day festival, make trouble for limbs already weary with labor, but

IT IS THE WEARINESS AND THE SELF-SACRIFICE