Now Grace had that perfect intuitive knowledge of just what the matter was with her brother that women always have who have grown up in intimacy with a man. These fine female eyes see farther between the rough cracks and ridges of the oak-bark of manhood than men themselves. DEACON PITKIN’S FARM. [Sidenote: The New England wife-mother.] New England had of old times, and has still, perhaps, in her farm-houses, these women who seem from year to year to develop in the spiritual sphere as the bodily form shrinks and fades. While the cheek grows thin and the form spare, the will-power grows daily stronger; though the outer man perish, the inner man is renewed day by day. The worn hand that seems so weak yet holds every thread and controls every movement of the most complex family life, and wonders are daily accomplished by the presence of a woman who seems little more than a spirit. The New England wife-mother was the one little jeweled pivot on which all the wheel-work of the family moved. * * * * * [Sidenote: Suppression.] It was not the first time that, wounded by a loving hand in this dark struggle of life, she had suppressed the pain of her own hurt, that he that had wounded her might the better forgive himself. AGNES OF SORRENTO. [Sidenote: True beauty.] “A beautiful face is a kind of psalm Which makes one want to be good.” * * * * * [Sidenote: Forcing a daughter.] “After all, sister, what need of haste? ’Tis a young bird yet. Why push it out of the nest? When once it is gone you will never get it back. Let the pretty one have her little day to play and sing and be happy. Does she not make this garden a sort of Paradise with her little ways and her sweet words? Now, my sister, these all belong to you; but, once she is given to another, there is no saying what may come. One thing only may you count on with certainty: that these dear days when she is all day by your side and sleeps in your bosom all night are over,—she will belong to you no more, but to a strange man who hath neither toiled nor wrought for her, and all her pretty ways and dutiful thoughts must be for him.” UNCLE TOM’S CABIN. [Sidenote: Beautiful old age.] Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful, downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from her high, placid forehead, on which time had written no inscription except “Peace on earth, good will to men,” and beneath shone a large pair of clear, honest, loving, brown eyes; you only needed to look straight into them, to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman’s bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women? * * * * * [Sidenote: Exaction.]