“Keep to the middle of the road,” in these things, and you will hold your youth and friends, and make a home that it is good to go into. As far as possible take your pleasures and recreations together. Plan for each other in this, and see how it keeps the sweetness in life. A fresh, bright, young looking neighbor called on me a few days ago, and when, during our conversation, she spoke of her age as forty-two, I was amazed, and said: “I should never have thought you were more than thirty-five.” “I have kept young,” she replied, “and I know how. If there has ever been pleasure taken in our family, it is always planned for when I can enjoy it. In the evening when the cares of the day are over, or when I can get away from the cares at other times.” She has five splendid children, and the promise of a sixth. She does the larger part of her home work, and yet takes time to keep young. It rests with you largely, young wives, during the first years of your lives together to fix the habits of our home in the duties of rest and recreation. Have firm principles about these matters and insist lovingly upon them. And now a word upon a more delicate question, but one which has much to do with settling and perfecting all the others, or spoiling your happiness almost irremediably. Many a marriage which otherwise would have been happy, is wrecked in the first days of the honeymoon. Frightened and timid, and filled with a vague unrest at the mysteries of marriage which await their revelation, you place your destiny in the keeping of your husband, for wedded happiness or wedded woe. Whispers and covert suggestions of the unwise ones about you, as they allude to the life you are coming to, have given you this unrest, and it remains for the husband, by his loving considerateness to win you away from fearfulness to a sure confidence in himself. Many otherwise kind men have become possessed with the thought that every right is theirs immediately; and in their inconsiderate, rapacious passion, in the speedy consummation of marriage, at whatever cost of pain or wounded feeling on the part of her whom they have taken to love and honor, they well nigh wreck the after happiness of both in the first days of their united lives. Husband beware of the wrong of committing a veritable outrage upon the person of her whom God has given you as your companion, and suffering ever after the stings of remorse, that she never again can feel the same respect and love for you that she could, had you been more considerate of her feelings and desires. It will be difficult for her to be persuaded that the animal nature does not control and dominate your love for her, rather than the higher instincts of the soul.