The husband’s duty must therefore be to establish in the mind of his partner an entire reliance on his affection, and a thorough persuasion that he is disposed to the full amount of his power to promote her comfort. Let him not think it beneath him to take an interest in her domestic arrangements: by showing that he does so, he will make her sensible that her efforts to render home pleasing are not unappreciated; her labour for that end will be redoubled, and yet prove more light to her. As he must be abroad the greater part of the day, let him not deprive her of his company in the hours of leisure that business leaves him. A man cannot altogether seclude himself from the world in the bosom of his family; neither can he always carry his wife along with him: but he must not for a light reason allow himself to be detained from her society. A woman’s hours are often lonely; and after she has bestowed her whole cares for a day to set her house in order, and anxiously awaits her husband’s return, in the hope of enjoying a few hours of mutually endearing converse by the cheerful hearth, if she have to watch every approaching footstep in vain, it is a cruel disappointment. One of the greatest sins which the husband can commit, is that of making a practice of staying out late at night, which, though not reckoned among the usual catalogue of crimes against social life, is one of those most worthy of reprobation. The mental anguish endured by many excellent wives from this infamous practice, no one can picture unless he have witnessed it. There, by the lonely hearth—the fire sunk to a cinder and a mass of ashes—the candle verging to its close in the socket—the dingy silent apartment strewed with the toys and furniture of the children, sent hours since to bed—there, in the midst of this domestic wilderness sits the drooping, desponding, almost broken-hearted wife, counting the hours, and conning over in her wearied mind the numbers of times she has been so deserted, and foreseeing the still greater misery which awaits her by such a course of profligacy in her husband. And for what, may we ask, has the master of the household thus deserted his home?—the company of hollow friends, idle acquaintances, perhaps drunkards or gamblers, whose witless jocularity forms the temptation to abandon a good name, fortune, worldly respectability, and self-esteem. None but the wife who has endured trials of this nature can properly understand the horrors resulting from such a life of folly and dissipation.