By these rules should the home be formed; in these paths should the children be led, who should never be allowed for one moment to despise those they may consider below them in the social scale; who should always be taught to share their flowers, their shells, their holidays and pleasures with others; and who should one and all be brought up to do something in life, something to assist the toiling millions around us, something to do good to someone besides themselves. Of course this is hard and anxious work; work, could we have realised it was before us when we so lightly accepted our fate, and laid together the foundations of a new home, we might never have found courage to take up; but it is the work set before every married man and woman in the world. They can either accept it or reject it; but if they do leave it alone, the undone work will bring its own punishment in the unhappy wicked children, and the wrecked and miserable home that will take the place of that which might have been the home which is the rule, not the exception, in England, and that we can all have if we have powers of endless work in us, and realise from others’ experience what is before us all. Then, when the curtain falls, when the hands part which have held each other so fondly, so faithfully, all through the journey, the worst parts of which have been gilded by the unfailing love which is God’s best gift, the one who goes can go boldly into the darkness, content to leave all to that Higher Power who has helped them so gallantly all through the struggle, while the one who stays knows that the link still binds them together, and will draw them some day back to each other again. When love can do this, when love can build, maintain, and keep our homes together, as love does, and as only love can, who shall dare to sneer and laugh at it, and looking at such homes dare ask sarcastically if marriage be a failure? Marriage never is, never can be, a failure, if the home is a true home, not an abode of vanity, an entertaining house, for gaiety and waste; and it is to help others just a little more from my own experience of the happiest of all homes--my own--that I have written this other book about the household and all that appertains to it, which I now leave to my good friends and readers, content to feel that they will read me kindly, knowing of old how kind they can be to one who has said as much to them on this all-fascinating subject as I have. PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON. ADDRESSES Messrs. SMEE & COBAY, Finsbury Pavement, E.C. Messrs. WALLACE & CO., 151 Curtain Road, E.C. Messrs. E. E. PITHER & CO., 38 Mortimer Street, E.C. Messrs. KAY & SONS, Burnley Mills, Burnley, Lancashire. Messrs. JACKSON & SONS, 199 High Street, Borough, S.E. Messrs. HAINES & CO., 83 Queen Victoria Street, E.C.