Another method which will be found peculiarly effective is to make a _present_ of some fine work to your wife. Of course, whether she or you have the name of buying it, it will go into your collection, and be yours to all intents and purposes. But it stops remark in the presentation. A wife could not reprove you for so kindly thinking of her. No matter what she suspects, she will say nothing. And then if there are three or four more works which have come home with the gift-book--they will pass through the favor of the other. These are pleasures denied to wealth and old bachelors. Indeed, one cannot imagine the peculiar pleasure of buying books if one is rich and stupid. There must be some pleasure, or so many would not do it. But the full flavor, the whole relish of delight only comes to those who are so poor that they must engineer for every book. They sit down before them, and besiege them. They are captured. Each book has a secret history of ways and means. It reminds you of subtle devices by which you insured and made it yours, in spite of poverty! Copyrighted by Fords, Howard and Hulbert, New York. SELECTED PARAGRAPHS From 'Selections from the Published Works of Henry Ward Beecher', compiled by Eleanor Kirk. An intelligent conscience is one of the greatest of luxuries. It can hardly be called a necessity, or how would the world have got along as well as it has to this day?--SERMON: 'Conscience.' A man undertakes to jump across a chasm that is ten feet wide, and jumps eight feet; and a kind sympathizer says, "What is going to be done with the eight feet that he did jump?" Well, what _is_ going to be done with it? It is one of those things which must be accomplished in whole, or it is not accomplished at all.--SERMON: 'The True Value of Morality.' It is hard for a strong-willed man to bow down to a weak-willed man. It is hard for an elephant to say his prayers to an ant.--SERMON: 'The Reward of Loving.' When Peter heard the cock crow, it was not the tail-feathers that crew. The crowing came from the inside of the cock. Religion is something more than the outward observances of the church.--SERMON: 'The Battle of Benevolence.' I have heard men, in family prayer, confess their wickedness, and pray that God would forgive them the sins that they got from Adam; but I do not know that I ever heard a father in family prayer confess that he had a bad temper. I never heard a mother confess in family prayer that she was irritable and snappish. I never heard persons bewail those sins which are the engineers and artificers of the moral condition of the family. The angels would not know what to do with a prayer that began, "Lord, thou knowest that I am a scold."--SERMON: 'Peaceableness.'