Most people can see what is faulty in themselves and their surroundings; but while the dreamer frets and wears himself out over the unattainable, the happy, practical man is satisfied with what _can_ be attained. There was much wisdom in the answer given by the principal of a large public institution when complimented on his habitual cheerfulness amid a diversity of cares: "I've made up my mind," he said, "to be satisfied when things are done _half_ as well as I would have them." Ideality often becomes an insidious mental and moral disease, acting all the more subtlely from its alliance with what is noblest in us. The virtue of conscientiousness may turn into the vice of censoriousness if misapplied. It was the constant prayer of the great and good Bishop Butler that he might be saved from what he called "scrupulosity." Dr. Johnson used to admire this wise sentence in Thomas à Kempis: "Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." Searching for domestic happiness would not be as unsuccessful as it is with some people if they were not continually finding fault. Jeremy Taylor impresses this fact by one of his quaint illustrations: "The stags in the Greek epigram, whose knees were clogged with frozen snow upon the mountains, came down to the brooks of the valleys, hoping to thaw their joints with the waters of the stream; but there the frost overtook them, and bound them fast in ice, till the young herdsmen took them in their stranger snare. It is the unhappy chance of many men finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of single life, they descend into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles, and there they enter into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by the cords of a man's or woman's peevishness." The Psalmist says that "God maketh men to be of one mind in a house." Let husband and wife live near Him, and He will enable them to avoid domestic strife which Cowper declares to be the "sorest ill of human life." CHAPTER XXIV. NETS AND CAGES. "I think for a woman to fail to make and keep a happy home, is to be a 'failure' in a truer sense than to have failed to catch a husband."--_Frances Power Cobbe._ "We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry."--_Vittoria Corombona._ When Mr. Wilberforce was a candidate for Hull, his sister, an amiable and witty young lady, offered a new dress to each of the wives of those freemen who voted for her brother. When saluted with "Miss Wilberforce for ever!" she pleasantly observed, "I thank you, gentlemen, but I cannot agree with you, for really I do not wish to be _Miss_ Wilberforce for ever." We do not blame Miss Wilberforce or any other young lady for not wishing to be a "Miss" for ever; but we desire to point out in this chapter that all is not done when the husband is gained.