Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping in ashes as a means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her scourges,—accept them, rejoice in them, smile and be quiet, silent, patient, and loving under them,—and the convent can teach her no more. She is a victorious saint. HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS. [Sidenote: A help-meet.] My wife resembles one of those convex mirrors I have sometimes seen. Every idea I threw out, plain and simple, she reflected back upon me in a thousand little glitters and twinkles of her own; she made my crude conceptions come back to me in such perfectly dazzling performances that I hardly recognized them. * * * * * [Sidenote: A true home.] How many, morally wearied, wandering, disabled, are healed and comforted by the warmth of a true home! When a mother has sent her son to the temptations of a distant city, what news is so glad to her heart as that he has found some quiet family where he visits often and is made to feel _at home_? How many young men have good women saved from temptation and shipwreck, by drawing them often to the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor artist—the wandering genius who has lost his way in this world, and stumbles like a child among hard realities,—the many men and women, who, while they have houses, have no homes,—see from afar, in their distant, bleak life-journey, the light of a true home-fire, and if made welcome there, warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger to their pilgrimage. Let those who have accomplished this beautiful and perfect work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them not seek to bolt the doors and draw the curtains; for they know not, and will never know till the future life, of the good they may do by the ministration of this great charity of home. THE CHIMNEY CORNER. [Sidenote: The art of home-making.]