MUSIC is an accomplishment unusually valuable as a home enjoyment, rallying round the piano the various members of a family, and harmonizing their hearts, as well as their voices, particularly in devotional strains. We know no more agreeable and interesting spectacle than that of brothers and sisters playing and singing together those elevated compositions in music and poetry which gratify the taste and purify the heart, while their parents sit delighted by. We have seen and heard an elder sister thus leading the family choir, who was the soul of harmony to the whole household, and whose life was a perfect example. Parents should not fail to consider the great value of home music. Buy a good instrument and teach your family to sing and play, then they can produce sufficient amusement at home themselves so the sons will not think of looking elsewhere for it, and thus often be led into dens of vice and immorality. The reason that so many become dissipated and run to every place of amusement, no matter what its character, making every effort possible to get away from home at night, is the lack of entertainment at home. WE How To Make Home Happy. E are defeated in our attempts to make home cheerful and happy because we play too much and we work too hard. We task and weary ourselves so much in the endeavor to collect the materials for enjoyment that they can give us little pleasure when they are collected. It does not take much to make children contented and happy in their own home, provided parents take the lead in simple habits, gentle manners and cheerful dispositions. It takes but very little to make grown people love their homes, provided they look for its chief ornament and greatest charm in themselves, and not in things that can be bought or borrowed. The rare and costly ornaments of our houses give us most pain and least pleasure. It flatters our pride to be able to say that we have something that very few or nobody else can have. But our peace and comfort and joy must come from the most simple and common blessings of life. And the first lesson to learn in the happy art of making home happy, is to be content with simple and common things. The farther you go from the everyday paths of life in search of happiness, the less likely you are to find it. A thankful heart makes the best dinner, a pleasant voice is the best music, a kind look is a more beautiful picture than was ever painted by any masters, old or new. These are things that all can command. They can be had for the humblest home without money and without price. If you make the happiness of the family depend upon things rare and costly and farfetched, you will only multiply wants without improving your capacity to supply them. If your necessities increase faster than your resources, no matter how much money you may have, you will always be poor. It is impossible to satisfy the heart with getting and giving. If it ever finds rest, it must be satisfied from itself. To be happy with much or little, we must learn to be content with such things as we have. The enjoyment of life does not depend upon the amount of possessions or the measure of wordly success, but upon the disposition to receive everything with thankfulness, and give everything with love. The house, the furniture, the mode of living, the dress, the entertainment, the equipage which cost most give the least satisfaction, simply because they have no necessary connection with the enjoyment of life. They involve a thousand cares and anxieties, and they withdraw attention from the simple and common things which can make any home happy. The ornaments which make the lowliest dwelling beautiful and the poorest family rich, are kind looks, pleasant voices, gentle manners, cheerful hearts, simple affections. The best clock has the fewest wheels and makes the least noise. And the more simple the order of our domestic life, the better and happier it will be. Let there be no idle hands and no wasted hours, and then there will be time for everything and nobody will be fluttered with haste or exhausted with weariness. The peace and happiness of the family must not depend upon having too many things done or too many hands to do it. Neatness and order are excellent virtues in the family, but they may be carried to such an excess as to be a daily torment to everybody in the house. Some excellent people spend the best of their days in keeping a few articles of furniture. arranged with painful propriety, and in sweeping and scourging a few particles of dust from every resting place in the house. When children grow up in such a family, and go out into the world, they are apt to fly to the other extreme, and become very indifferent about the dust and disorder which have been denounced and fought against with anxious and angry zeal in their own homes. If you wait to get more money, or a bigger house, or better established in the world, before you begin to make home happy, you will be like travelers in the desert, looking for showers where it never rains, or like the sailor on his foundering vessel loading himself with gold and leaping into the sea to die rich. If you do not learn to be content with simple and common things, then the rare and costly will only increase your trouble. The great house and the great income and the great expense will bring great care and great weariness and great sorrow. Seek your happiness now, from the grateful improvement of present blessings and a cheerful submission to present trials, and then whatever change the future may bring it will find you the possessor of a happy home. Make your dress, your house, your furniture, your style of living, such as will not subject you to struggle and anxiety to keep up appearances, and then do not mind what the world says. If others do not think the better of you for taking such a course, it is the worse for them, and no harm to you. And let all work and diversion, speech and silence, be chastened and purified with the feeling and the thought of the heavenly Father's presence. Be not slow to believe that he loves to see his children happy. Lie down to repose at night with the prayer that he will give you sleep as he gives to his beloved. Rise up in the morning with thankfulness for the new gift of time fresh from our Father's hand. Eat not the bread of cares and sorrows, but receive gratefully what your Father gives, and rejoice as if fed on angels' food. So shall everything that imperils the peace and happiness of the family be met by the safeguard of rrust, duty and love. So shall the lowliest ea th ly home be made the entrance-chamber to God's great house in heaven. I Home Voices. AM so homesick in this summer weather! Where is my home upon this weary earth The maple trees are bursting into freshness Around the pleasant place that gave me birth. But dearer far, a grave for me is waiting, Far up among the pine trees' greener shade; The willow boughs the hand of love has planted, Wave o'er the hillock where my dead are laid. Why go without me-oh, ye loved and loving? Home Affection. AFFECTION does not beget weakness, nor is it effeminate for a brother to be tenderly at tached to his sisters. That boy will make the noblest, the bravest man. On the battlefield, in many terrible battles during our late horrible war, I always noticed that those boys who had been reared under the tenderest home culture always made the best soldiers. They were always brave, always endured the severe hardships of camp, the march, or on the bloody field most silently, and were most dutiful at every call. More, much more, they resisted the frightful temptations that so often surrounded them, and seldom returned to their loved ones stained with the sins incident to war. Another point, they were always kind and polite to those they met in the enemy's country. Under their protection, woman was always safe. How often I have heard one regiment compared with another, when the cause of the difference was not comprehended by those who drew the comparison! I knew the cause, it was the home education. We see the same every day in the busy life of the city. Call together one hundred young men in our city, and spend an evening with them, and we will tell you their home education. Watch them as they approach young ladies, and converse with them, and we will show you those who have been trained under the influence of home affection and politeness, and those who have not. That young man who was accustomed to kiss his sweet, innocent, loving sister night and morning as they met, shows its influence on him, and he will never forget it, and when ne shal! take some one to his heart as his wife, she shall reap the golden fruit thereof. The young man who was in the habit of giving his arm to his sister as they walked to and from church, will never leave his wife to find her way as best she can. The young man who has been taught to see that his sister had a seat before he sought his, will never mortify a neglected wife in the presence of strangers. And that young man who always handed his sister to her chair at the table, will never have cause to blush as he sees some gentleman extend to his wife the courtesy she knows is due from him. Mothers and daughters, wives and sisters, remember that you have the making of the future of this great country, and rise at once to your high and holy duty. Remember that you must make that future, whether you will or not. We are all what you make us. Ah! throw away your weakening follies of fashion, and soul famine, and rise to the level where God intended you should be, and make every one of your homes, from this day, schools of true politeness and tender affection. Take those little curly-headed boys, and teach them all you would have men to be, and my word for it, they will be just such men, and will go forth to bless the world, and crown you with a glory such as queens and empresses never dreamed of. Wield your power now, and you shall reap the fruit in your ripe age. -H. C. Dane. The Old Log Cabin. T is only shallow minded pretenders who either make distinguished origin a matter of personal merit, or obscure origin a matter of personal reproach. Taunts and scoffing at the humble condition of early life affect nobody in America but those who are foolish enough to indulge in them; and they are generally sufficiently punished by public rebuke. A man who is not ashamed of himself need not be ashamed of his early condition. It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin; but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin, raised among the snowdrifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early, that when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to teach them the hardships endured by the generations gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living; and if ever I am ashamed of it, or if ever I fail in affectionate veneration for him who reared it, and defended it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and, through the fire and blood of a seven years' revolutionary war, shrank from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name, and the name of my posterity, be blotted forever from the memory of mankind! -Daniel Webster. AN The Love of Home. ND let me linger in this place for an instant to remark, if ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the truer material and bear the stamp of Heaven. The man of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as a part of himself; as trophies of his birth and power: his associations with them are associations of pride, and wealth and triumph. The poor man's attachment to the tenement he holds, which strangers have held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood, with no alloy of siver, gold or precious stones; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty fare, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a solemn place. Oh, if those who rule the destinies of nations would but remember this-if they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found,—if they would but turn aside from the wide thoroughfares and great houses, and strive to improve the wretched dwellings in by-ways where only poverty may walk,-many low roofs would point more truly to the sky, than the loftiest steeple that now rears proudly up from the midst of guilt and crime, and horrible disease to mock them by contrast. In hollow voices from workhouse, hospital and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years. It is no light matter -no outcry from the working vulgar-no mere question of the people's health and comfort that may be whistled down on Wednesday nights. In love of home, the love of country has |