"According to Milton, 'Eve kept silence in Eden to hear her husband talk,'" said a gentleman to a lady friend; and then added, in a melancholy tone, "Alas! there have been no Eves since." "Because," quickly retorted the lady, "there have been no husbands worth listening to." Certainly there are too few men who exert themselves to be as agreeable to their wives (their best friends), as they are to the comparative strangers or secret enemies whom they meet at clubs and other places of resort. And yet if it is true that "to be agreeable in our family circle is not only a positive duty but an absolute morality," then every husband and wife should say on their wedding day-- "To balls and routs for fame let others roam, Be mine the happier lot to please at home." In one of the letters of Robertson, of Brighton, he tells of a lady who related to him "the delight, the tears of gratitude which she had witnessed in a poor girl to whom, in passing, I gave a kind look on going out of church on Sunday. What a lesson! How cheaply happiness can be given! What opportunities we miss of doing an angel's work! I remember doing it, full of sad feelings, passing on, and thinking no more about it; and it gave an hour's sunshine to a human life, and lightened the load of life to a human heart for a time!" If even a look can do so much, who shall estimate the power of kind or unkind words in making married life happy or miserable? In the home circle more than anywhere else-- "Words are mighty, words are living: Serpents with their venomous stings, Or bright angels, crowding round us, With heaven's light upon their wings: Every word has its own spirit, True or false that never dies; Every word man's lips have uttered Echoes in God's skies." CHAPTER XXIII. PULLING TOGETHER. "When souls, that should agree to will the same, To have one common object for their wishes, Look different ways, regardless of each other, Think what a train of wretchedness ensues!" Said a husband to his angry wife: "Look at Carlo and Kitty asleep on the rug; I wish men lived half as agreeably with their wives." "Stop!" said the lady. "Tie them together, and see how they will agree!" If men and women when tied together sometimes agree very badly what is the reason? Because instead of pulling together each of them wishes to have his or her own way. But when they do pull together what greater thing is there for them than "to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in the silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"