A mean husband is either a Nero or a zero; he either dethrones his wife in the home and stabs his helpless and innocent little ones with curses and cruelty, or starves them with cold neglect. He rules with sneers instead of smiles—with blows instead of blessings, or strangles laughter and love in his home with drunkenness and debauchery. How many wives walk the floor every night waiting for footsteps they dread to hear! How many children shiver in their rags and watch for brutal and improvident fathers. God pity the home of the man who staggers out of the path of righteousness. A good man goes out into the world and bears the burdens of life with a willing heart. If virtue sanctifies his home and peace and contentment laugh and sing around his hearthstone, there is no anguish he will not endure for the happiness of his children, there is no agony he will not suffer for the sake of his wife, no sin of hers he will not condone save one, and that is disloyalty. Many a fortune has been lost in the lottery of love by drawing the wrong ticket. Many a sweet home has been broken up and many a guiltless man has been butted to death by the billy goat of Ananias as a penalty for unwittingly wandering in strange and unknown pastures of Romance. The Commercial Traveler. Commercial travelers are the Eden builders of the world; they are the evangels of human happiness; they carry heavens of pure delight in their sample cases. There are heavens of music in the rustle of their silks, heavens of the beautiful in their laces and lawns, heavens of rapture in their spring bonnets and jewels. They are the tidal waves of commerce, the rolling billows of progress, the trade winds of civilization. They touch all shores and never cease to blow. Many a castle builder presses their fragrant havanas to his lips and his dreams turn to curling castles in the air. Many a dreamer sips their mellow wines and lo! a thousand fairies with jeweled wings flutter in his veins and flit among the flowers in the garden of his dreams. Wherever the commercial travelers swarm there is honey in the gum and the flowers of prosperity are in bloom. They carry the pollen-dust of business on their wings and the honey of wealth in their grips. And whenever they cease to hum about a town it is a sure sign that prosperity is a withered blossom there and that there are weevils in the gum. The garden spider weaves her web among the honeysuckles and spins as she weaves without distaff or loom. She stretches her radial warp of silvery filaments and then lays on her woof. From the center outward she glides in one continuous spiral, and as she crosses each radius of the warp she touches it deftly with her foot as if to weld the viscid fiber. And thus her shining net grows until it hangs suspended in the air, half visible, half vanishing, like some phantom wheel of moonbeams.