Your home, when it is entered, is just what it should be,--quiet, small,--with everything she wishes, and nothing more than she wishes. The sun strikes it in the happiest possible way; the piano is the sweetest-toned in the world; the library is stocked to a charm;--and Madge, that blessed wife, is there, adorning and giving life to it all. To think even of her possible death is a suffering you class with the infernal tortures of the Inquisition. You grow twin of heart and of purpose. Smiles seem made for marriage; and you wonder how you ever wore them before! * * * * * So a year and more wears off of mingled home-life, visiting, and travel. A new hope and joy lightens home: there is a child there. ----What a joy to be a father! What new emotions crowd the eye with tears, and make the hand tremble! What a benevolence radiates from you toward the nurse,--toward the physician,--toward everybody! What a holiness and sanctity of love grows upon your old devotion to that wife of your bosom--the mother of your child! The excess of joy seems almost to blur the stories of happiness which attach to heaven. You are now joined, as you were never joined before, to the great family of man. Your name and blood will live after you; nor do you once think (what father can?) but that it will live honorably and well. With what a new air you walk the streets! With what a triumph you speak, in your letter to Nelly, of "your family!" Who, that has not felt it, knows what it is to be "a man of family!" How weak now seem all the imaginations of your single life; what bare, dry skeletons of the reality they furnished! You pity the poor fellows who have no wives or children--from your soul; you count their smiles as empty smiles, put on to cover the lack that is in them. There is a freemasonry among fathers that they know nothing of. You compassionate them deeply; you think them worthy objects of some charitable association; you would cheerfully buy tracts for them, if they would but read them,--tracts on marriage and children. ----And then "the boy,"--_such_ a boy! There was a time when you thought all babies very much alike;--alike? Is your boy like anything, except the wonderful fellow that he is? Was there ever a baby seen, or even read of, like that baby! ----Look at him: pick him up in his long, white gown: he may have an excess of color,--but such a pretty color! he is a little pouty about the mouth,--but such a mouth! His hair is a little scant, and he is rather wandering in the eye,--but, Good Heavens, what an eye!