Cream Sticks.-Delicious candy is made by beating the white of one egg, and working in all the confectioner's sugar that you possibly can. Shape the candy in sticks and cover with melted chocolate, flavor the sugar with vanilla; instead of chocolate you may cover the sticks with grated cocoanut; in this case flavor with lemon.

Chocolate Drops.—Delicious chocolate drops are made by melting the chocolate, and dipping little pieces of pine-apple in it; canned pine-apple will of course answer. White Candy.-One cup of granulated sugar, one pint of water, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Boil just as you do molasses candy, but do not stir it. You can tell when it is done by trying it in cold water. Pull as if it were molasses

candy. Have a dish near by with some vanilla in it, and work in enough to flavor it as you pull. Put it in a cold room, and the next day you will have delicious candy. This is similar to the ice-cream candy, vinegar being used instead of cream of tartar.

Golden Rules for Boys and Girls.

1. Shut every door after you, and without slamming it.

2. Never shout, jump, or run, in the house.

3. Never call to persons up stairs, or in the next room; if you wish to speak to them, go quietly where they are.

4. Always speak kindly and politely to the servants, if you would have them do the same to you.

5. When told to do, or not to do, a thing by either parent, never ask why you should or should not do it.

6. Tell of your own faults and misdoings, not those of your brothers and sisters.

7. Carefully clean the mud or snow off your boots before entering the house. 8. Be prompt at every meal hour.

9. Never sit down at the table, or in the parlor, with dirty hands or tumbled hair.

10. Never interrupt any conversation, but wait patiently your turn to speak. 11. Never reserve your good manners for company, but be equally polite at home and abroad.

12. Let your first, last, and best friend be your mother.

That little home of warm-hearted piety, a star of strength and beauty, shines far out over the steep hill paths and snowy valleys of New England. It is set in the midst of a community where, as a rule, self-denial and honest self-respect prevail. A little house with a half-dozen rooms. One of these is the minister's study. I can see it as I write. There is a plain, well-worn desk near the window, on which, close to the pastor's hand, lie the Bible, the concordance, the small, brown covered Greek Testament and the big Unabridged Dictionary; the church hymn-book, with sheets of paper bearing notes for sermons and the several other evidences of toil and diligence which appertain to the minister's workshop. On the shelves which line the side between the window and the door books, large and small, stand in orderly rows. The minister's wife dusts them, and sometimes, when she has a half-hour to spare, drops into the low chair near the fire, where all her babies have been rocked to sleep, and reads a page from some favorite author. It rests her to look at the backs of the books, she says, even when she has not time to read them.

From that little study what influences go out into the parish and from the parish to the world! Around the church, with its white spire, and around the parsonage stretch worn, old fields which yield but meager harvests wrested from the ground by hardest labor. Thence the sturdy sons of the soil hasten in their early manhood to seek an easier life and golden gains in some crowded seaport or stirring inland town.

Before the boy leaves home, however, home has set her stamp upon him and impressed him with her indelible trade mark. He is alert, intelligent, ambitious and anxious to make the most of himself, and so he has taken many a problem and many a baffling question to the minister's house. He has borrowed the minister's books, the minister's library being generously at the disposal of those of the people who are book hungry, and he has gained many a little hint and useful suggestion from the minister's wife and daughter. The touch of social polish, ease of manner, quickness of repartee, the savoir-faire, which make the difference between awkwardness and grace of bearing, are often gained insensibly by lads who have had limited opportunities in a social way through this very intercourse with the minister and his family.

If, as is probable, the minister keeps in frequent communication with the world outside his parish, he brings its feeling of activity and its genial manner into his daily contact with his people, and they catch his spirit and tone. Our

minister has taught us to shake hands," said a woman not long ago, alluding to a curiously reticent and undemonstrative village congregation. They were in truth a warm-hearted set, but they had not cultivated the gift of expression, and it was developed in them by the hearty and genial air of the young "Greatheart" who became their pastor.

Whoever has observed the preaching in country pulpits will bear witness that it is almost invariably thoughtful, devout and earnest. Often it is also eloquent and scholarly. From the gray-headed, brown-handed deacons who listen critically, yet sympathetically, to the presentation of gospel truths, to the bright girls and boys who wait after morning service to attend the Sunday School, no one fails to be affected in greater or less degree by the excellent preaching. have been fed with the finest of the wheat in country churches so that certain summers among the hills live in most grateful memory. But it is as much to the minister's wife, who does no preaching, as to the good man himself that the

In her thin hand she holds deftly the social
It is she who cheers her husband

church at large owes a debt.
threads which converge at the parsonage.

in the hour of depression, the reaction after the fervor of preaching, when he fears he will never preach again, she who sends him forth to call on this and the other parishioner, reminds him of the visitor stopping at the doctor's, and the anxious time a neighbor is having over a son ill in a distant township. A college graduate herself, she keeps up certain studies, perhaps finds time to catalogue the flora or the birds of the neighborhood, and sets to the girls of the place an example of lovely, harmonious womanhood which it is well for them to see and to follow.

Let us not be slow to acknowledge our indebtedness to the country parsonage. Can we not in some thoughtful moment discover a way to brighten it?

Dress Considered as a Duty.

HEODORE CHILD, whose taste in dress and adornment was most fastidious and whose latest work, "Wimples and Crisping Pins," was an elaborate study of the coiffures of women during many centuries, held that "no modern woman wore ornaments enough." Thoroughly Oriental in his way of looking at the subject on which his pen dwelt lovingly, Mr. Child said many things which we, daughters of the Covenanters or the Puritans, cannot possibly accept. Between the jewelled and brocaded dames of Mr. Child's research and Pleasant Riderhood doing up her back hair there stretches a long space of neutral ground. We practical women, who read our Bibles every day, keep house with diligence and dress with some degree of attention to the reigning mode, find plenty of opportunity for noting the effect of our dressing upon our own feelings and on the minds of our children and friends.

A glance at the women of our acquaintance shows that few are careless or slatternly. The day of keeping on an unbecoming chocolate-colored calico, minus a collar, from morning till night has gone by for the busiest of us. Stepping from the buttery to the dining-room the farmer's wife and daughters are neat and trim, and the town-bred woman in her working gown is equally natty and trig and

shorn of superflous details. One might deprecate a certain mannishness visible in the vests and the shirt fronts and cravats of our girls as they go to the business office or the schoolroom, were it not that the bright eyes and soft bloom and braided hair set off the uncompromising tailor-made dress, so that its masculinity is condoned. Anyway, as a dear old lady remarked the other day: "This is the girl's own lookout, and certainly their dress is more sensible than that of their grandmothers' paper-soled shoes and low necks and the rest of it."

Readers of Shirley remember how Caroline and her friend went across the dew-wet fields the night the mill was burned in white gowns and slippers, with curls floating and catching in the brambles as they fled along. The contrast indicated is very marked. A writer of to-day would put her heroines into serge or cheviot, with thick boots, for such a tramp as that.

But to come to the gist of the matter. There is a moral influence exerted on us, quite insensibly, by the mere fact of our dressing well and appropriately. If we are arrayed as we should be, for an occasion of any description, we shall be freed from self-consciousness and able to enjoy more, and, therefore, we shall appear better than if our dress is inappropriate. Of course, the really great person is above such a consideration. I heard a case in point not long ago. Το some splendid function a crowd of professional men were invited. All came in evening dress, as was proper. The solitary exception to this was a gentleman who had on a rough traveling suit with a red tie. My informant said, however, that he was entirely at his ease and made a brilliant after-dinner speech. The man in rough-and-ready clothes was an eminent surgeon, famed throughout the whole country. He had unexpectedly arrived in the city and was passing through it when he was captured by friends. His presence in a mackintosh would have been thought an honor, and he, being a sensible man, went dressed as he was, and gave pleasure and received it.

In the home it is worth while always to make some change in our dress when the work of the day is over. The husband likes to see his wife daintily attired; the children enjoy it and behave better because “ mamma has on a pretty gown," and the woman herself feels toned up and encouraged to undertake her tasks with greater alacrity. Bathing and brushing and possibly a nap precede the careful afternoon toilet, and the whole atmosphere is enlivened by the effort which has been made to present an attractive appearance in our little world. Why, I have seen a baby stop crying and laugh with pleasure when somebody held out her arms to him and he saw a pretty ribbon at her neck!