Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a shield. A true wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth, like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her husband as her appendage. Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave. Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do without her. While a thoughtful wife and mother is busied with the affairs of home, she is never done with her intellectual education, for she realizes early in her career that a mother loses half her influence with her children when she ceases to be their intellectual superior.