All this kind of grumbling appears to us most unreasonable and ridiculous; but if not inclined to find fault in any of the ways mentioned, we are beginning to fear that every one meets some point in life where he imagines dissatisfaction and complaint to be perfectly justifiable. Something in their surroundings is out of joint. Their most carefully laid plans and well-grounded expectations fail; friends grow cold; where lies the fault? Is none of it with you? The foundations of our worldly prosperity seem built on solid rock, but they slide from under us. We take to our hearts one dearer than our own life, and in an hour when we think not the bond is severed. Time and again the cradle is left empty; or a sweet and loving spirit emerges from it, and step by step grows toward clear companionship, when, as in a moment, God calls, and we are left in sackcloth and ashes. We murmur and repine,--God’s dealings appear so unequally distributed. In the same vicinity one family grows up unbroken, from babyhood into vigorous manhood, while another home is left desolate, and they cry out in their anguish, “I do well to be angry.” They forget that God deals with his children as they deal with the rich but uncultivated lands committed to their care. What is more beautiful to the eye than a large grove of wild orange-trees?--but how useless if left unimproved! Who complains when their beauty, for the present, is destroyed, the trees cut back and pruned till they stand bare and unsightly? But the buds and grafts which have been introduced will soon start into new life, the branches begin to shoot upward, and the sweet, pure blossoms and golden fruit will clothe the tree, which a grumbler would have thought wholly destroyed, with new beauty. The old beauty was defaced only that the tree should, in the end, become fruitful, and thereby more gloriously perfect than at first. Yet we murmur when our wild orange groves are cut back, pruned, and grafted, and the “seedlings” from our nurseries transplanted. We forget that “Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood Stand dressed in living green,” which are made more gloriously beautiful by every rare and precious plant that our Father transplants from this beautiful but stormy earth to his garden, “Where everlasting spring abides, And never withering flowers.” LXXXII. LITTLE FOXES SPOILING THE BELOVED VINE.