The divine message intended for her reached her in the Lord's house and she was enabled to go forward with renewed energy. But not alone to the hymn, sung by the trained quartet as part of their work for the day, was this message confined. Part of it was in the pastor's prayer that forgot no one, that included every home and heart in the congregation; part of it was in the rarely eloquent sermon, emphasizing practical duty and calling for fidelity in that which is least." Part of it, and no small part, came through the thought of the pastor himself, speaking as earnestly and with as thorough and conscientious preparation to the smaller evening as to the larger morning audience. Part of it, no doubt, was due to that sort of "Christian Endeavor" which, applied to the individual case, had brought this particular woman to her own pew that summer night.

There is a tendency to ignore or omit or set small store by the evening service on the Lord's Day. So long as we have a second service would it not be to our profit, perhaps to our great comfort and joy, to attend it faithfully? Only individual fidelity can remove the reproach that attaches to a thin evening congregation. Crowds are composed of units.

Tired Women.

I sometimes wonder whether it is really a necessity of our life of the period that so many of us should be almost always tired. For tired we are in body, soul and spirit, so tired that we neither do justice to ourselves nor do the good we ought to others. Children, friends, acquaintances fail to receive from us the rest and refreshment we might give them, simply because even the smallest cup of cold water weighs too heavily for our weary hands to hold it, our weary hearts to feel the need our neighbor has of its draught of sweetness.

Why are we so tired that life is a dragging progress uphill rather than an easy and delightful progress over a charming road, with new vistas of beauty opening at every turn. It is commonly supposed that it is because we have so much to do, and so little time and strength in which to do it, that we women are so worn out, not only now and then but as a rule. And some provoking people complacently observe that we ought not to attempt so much, that we should let things go; it would do just as well in the end. Others make comments on our lack of system or our too great devotion to system, either of which facts, in the mouth of the critic, assumes the air of a needless blunder.

We listen and we sigh. Should we adopt the laissez faire principle, it would bring upon us reprobation; it always does on the woman who is prone to let her household take its chances, and who orders its routine in a haphazard way. On

the other hand, the woman who plans, and carries out her plans with energy, compelling her family to be on time with military precision, is apt to gain the reputation of a domestic martinet. Both women, whichever course they elect to pursue, are quite likely to be tired much of the time.

A sensible method of procedure would be to find out where the trouble is; what, in our particular case, forms the straw too much which threatens to break us down altogether?

Some of us do not get out of doors often enough. We have a great deal to do in the house and no particular object to call us out, and so we stay in the kitchen and the chambers and the parlor from Sunday to Sunday. We literally do not taste fresh air and drink in sunlight oftener than once a week or once a fortnight the year through! It is no wonder that we are tired.

Some of us do too much sewing. Why spend so much time, for instance, in refashioning clothes that are in order and nice simply because they are not precisely in the latest mode? A tired little woman showed me the other day a gown which it had taken her a steady week, with two late night sittings and a fierce attack of headache, to change from the graceful, clinging skirt of one year to the bunchy and unbecoming skirt of another. Sew we must and sew we will, my sisters, but don't let us expend too much time and effort on the endeavor to be always up to date in our dress. Why not be independent enough to adopt our own styles, to a certain extent?

We might be less tired if we learned not to feel in haste. People talk of being wearied by worry. Hurry wears upon one quite as much as her twin-fiend, worry, and both are task-mistresses carrying whips. To worry and to hurry are to grow old in youth, to lose the sense of the elastic nerve and the buoyant spirit. If we can shut the door on these demons we shall be less tired by far than if we give them entrance. Fretting over the inevitable distresses and annoyances of our situation has much to do with tiring us. Fretting seldom does any good. It frequently does harm. Foreboding is as idle and as surely fraught with evil.

The remedy for all the trouble is a very old-fashioned one. The little golden key called prayer unlocks for every one of us the chamber called peace. The Saviour bade us remember that our Father knoweth what we have need of, and He said: "Fear not, little flock. It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." A thoroughly tranquil mind helps greatly toward the maintenance of tranquillity in the physical life. Let us assist, also, on needed help in household work. Our husbands and sons, wiser than we, have this in the field and the store. It is poor economy to work so hard that one becomes a drudge, so tired at night that one cannot go to sleep, so tired in the morning that sleep has not done its office of recuperation.

Daughters and Their Fathers.

The bond between a father and his daughter often seems peculiarly hallowed, and a tender sentiment pervades it which, on the one hand, leads to a steadfast loyalty, and on the other to a chivalrous devotion. One sees a certain gallantry in the bearing of the man whose young daughter, with her flower-like face and her delicate charm, renews for him the idyl of his early love; it is her mother living again as she was in the day when her beauty and sweetness made its triumphant appeal to his heart. The dear mother still reigns enthroned there, and the husband cherishes her as fondly as when she was a bride. He is, indeed, aware of no decadence in her loveliness, either of person or of character, and this beautiful, unchanging love of the man for his wife does not in the least mar the worshipful admiration he feels and shows when with his daughter. The daughter combines in herself two beloved existences.

I am more and more impressed with the single-hearted steadfastness, the exquisite and unconscious self-denial of men in the relationships they sustain in the family, and in nothing does their wonderful self-abnegation come out as in the line of their fatherhood. A man works early and late, year in and year out, with only occasional brief holidays, he grows thin and gray, he reduces his individual expenses to a minimum, he never complains, nor dreams that he is heroic, for his life is a long, glad sacrifice on the altar of his family. Possibly we may say that if he have a family it is his duty to support them and to do for them the very best that he can. Granting this, it is still worthy of all praise, the quiet, large-hearted, and lovingly generous way in which he goes about it. Well has our Father in heaven revealed to His children the measure and the strength of His love for them, by adopting the name which on earth stands for so much, and is at once so close and so dear in its meanings to those who have grown up in a household. Fittest and sweetest of all descriptive names for heaven is our "Father's house."

To the youthful daughter, in the vigor of her opening life, there come many opportunities of cheering her father. She can listen to his stories and make a chance for him to tell them, albeit they are familiar by repeated iteration to her ear. She can soothe him by small attentions when he is weary, play for him the music that he loves, sing the old tunes and songs which he prefers to later popular favorites. "Why are you giving so much time to musical study?" a girl was asked in my presence the other day. "To please my dear father," she answered. "Since my sister's marriage we have not had much music in the home, and papa missed it so much that I have laid other things aside and taken it up for his sake." "My father is working too hard, his eyes are overtaxed and life is too great a burden to him, with so many of us to support, and so I, as the oldest daughter,

have taken it on myself to relieve him of my support," said another bright young woman, who had gone into a mercantile establishment as bookkeeper.

One is grieved to the heart when forced to observe in the young people of a family impatience with their parents. What if the latter are a trifle too conservative, what if their ways of speech and manner are a little old fashioned? Never shall there dawn a day when the love they lavished on the helplessness of their children in babyhood will not be equal to any strain the grown children may put upon it, strain of sorrow, strain of disappointment, strain, it may be, of shame. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.”

And a little more closely linked than even the father's tie to the son is the golden chain which binds him to his daughter in our blessed Christian lands. One of the darkest shadows over heathendom must ever lie here, in the fact that the revelation of what his woman-child can be does not come to the father in the pagan home.