"I do not fear that women of such sense and energy will listen to the sophistries which would persuade them that elegant imbecility and inefficiency are charms of cultivated womanhood or ingredients in the poetry of life. She alone can keep the poetry and beauty of married life who has this poetry in her soul; who with energy and discretion can throw back and out of sight the sordid and disagreeable details which beset all human living, and can keep in the foreground that which is agreeable; who has enough knowledge of practical household matters to make unskilled and rude hands minister to her cultivated and refined tastes, and constitute her skilled brain the guide of unskilled hands. From such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens will seduce a man, even though the hair grow gray, and the merely physical charms of early days gradually pass away. The enchantment that was about her person alone in the days of courtship seems in the course of years to have interfused and penetrated the _home_ which she has created, and which in every detail is only an expression of her personality. Her thoughts, her plans, her provident care, are everywhere; and the _home_ attracts and holds by a thousand ties the heart which before marriage was held by the woman alone." POOR CHLOE. A TRUE STORY OF MASSACHUSETTS IN THE OLDEN TIME. "Let not ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the poor." GRAY'S _Elegy_. It was a long, long time ago, before the flame of gas was seen in the streets, or the sounds of the railroad were heard in the land; so long before, that, had any prophet then living foretold such magical doings, he would have been deemed a fit inhabitant of Bedlam. In those primitive times, the Widow Lawton was considered a rich woman, though her income would not go far toward clothing a city-fashionable in these days. She owned a convenient house on the sea-shore, some twelve or fifteen miles from Cape Ann; she cultivated ten acres of sandy soil, and had a well-tended fish-flake a quarter of a mile long. To own an extensive fish-flake was, in that neighborhood, a sure sign of being well to do in the world. The process of transmuting it into money was slow and circuitous; but those were not fast days. The fish were to be caught, and cleaned, and salted, and spread on the flake, and turned day after day till thoroughly dry. Then they were packed, and sent in vessels to Maryland or Virginia, to be exchanged for flour or tobacco; then the flour and tobacco were sold in foreign ports, and silks, muslins, and other articles of luxury procured with the money.