"Did you ever see anything so absurd as a horse sprawling like that?" This was the hasty exclamation of a connoisseur on taking up a small cabinet picture. "Excuse me," replied the owner, "you hold it the wrong way: it is a horse galloping." So much depends upon the way we look at things. In the preceding chapter we spoke of making the best of bad matrimonial bargains. Perhaps it would help some people to do this if they looked at marriage from a different point of view--if they considered it as a discipline of character rather than as a short cut to the highest heaven of happiness. Certainly this is a practical point of view, and it may be that those who marry in this spirit are more likely to use their matrimony rightly than those who start with happiness as their only goal. That people get happiness by being willing to pass it by and do without it rather than by directly pursuing it, is as true of domestic felicity as of other kinds. "Ven you're a married man, Samivel," says Mr. Weller to his son Sam, "you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but vether it's worth while going through so much to learn so little, as the charity boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o' taste: I rayther think it isn't." Strange that a philosopher of the senior Mr. Weller's profundity should underestimate in this way the value of matrimony as a teacher. We have it on the authority of a widower who was thrice married, that his first wife cured his romance, the second taught him humility, and the third made him a philosopher. Another veteran believes that five or six years of married life will often reduce a naturally irascible man to so angelic a condition that it would hardly be safe to trust him with a pair of wings. Webster asks-- "What do you think of marriage? I think, as those do who deny purgatory, It locally contains either heaven or hell, There is no third place in it." Is this true? We think not, for we know many married people who live in a third place, the existence of which is here denied. They are neither intensely happy nor intensely miserable; but they lose many faults, and are greatly developed in character by passing through a purgatorial existence. Nor is this an argument against matrimony, except to those who deny that "it is better to be seven times in the furnace than to come out unpurified." Sweet are the uses of this and every other adversity when these words of Sir Arthur Helps are applicable to its victims or rather victors: "That man is very strong and powerful who has no more hopes for himself, who looks not to be loved any more, to be admired any more, to have any more honour or dignity, and who cares not for gratitude; but whose sole thought is for others, and who only lives on for them."