She had gone to visit, in a household of ten persons, some of them were unconverted. The Lord gave her the prayer-Lord, give me all in this house. Although she remained but five days, every one got a blessing. She says:- The last night of my visit I was too happy to sleep, and passed most of the night in praise and renewal of my consecration, and these little couplets formed themselves and chimed in my heart, one after another, till they finished with, Ever, only, all for Thee.' This was in the December of 1873, and from this time she actually lived in the spirit of the hymn. The large collection of jewellery she owned was, in the year 1878, made over to the funds of the Church Missionary Society, thus giving proof of her sincerity in writing the couplet

Take my silver and my gold,
Not a mite would I withhold.

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Had space permitted, we should like to have dwelt upon her work as a teacher of the young and also a temperance advocate, but we refer our readers to her Memorials. Frances Ridley Havergal was an elect Christian, saint, singer, and poetess.

HENRY SMITH.

X.-UNSYMMETRICAL LIVES.

AN enterprising artist once printed a picture, after the fashion of the school which, with all its exaggerations, has done much for the reformation of modern art, as much as Wordsworth's startling, yet grand puerilities once did for that of modern poetry. Not a bad picture, though very pre-Raphaelite. Two decidedly plain young people leant against a wall, or rather seemed growing out of it; and the wall itself was painted minutely down to the last brick, over which a large green beetle was meditatively walking. The landscape beyond rose almost perpendicularly up to the sky, against which, sharply outlined on the top of a very verdant tree, was a solitary black crow, so large, that if seen on the ground he would have been as big as a sheep. He and the green beetle together quite distracted one's attention from the melan choly lovers; and though many parts of the picture were well painted, still there was a lack of proportion, which marred exceedingly the general effect. It was unlevel, irregular; a sacrifice of the whole to particular parts, which were carefully worked up,' while others were totally neglected. In short, it made one feel, with a sad moralizing, what a fatal thing in pictures, books, or human lives, is a lack of proportion.

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It is a plausible theory, that neither good nor evil, in concrete forms, is absolute; that each vice is the exaggerated extension of a virtue ; each virtue capable of being corrupted into a vice; so that the good and wise man becomes simply the man with acuteness enough to draw the exact line between both, and then to obey the advice, In medio tutissimus ibis.' If this be a sophism, there is yet truth in it. Undoubtedly the best man, the man most useful to his species, is he whose character is most equally balanced; and the most complete life is that which has been lived, so to speak, symmetrically. People with enormous faults and gigantic virtues may be very interesting in novels, but they are exceedingly inconvenient in real life. An equal person, with no offensively exaggerated qualities, is far the safest to have to do with, and especially to have to live with. When you marry, be sure you choose a woman with no strong peculiarities;' let her soul be well rounded and shapely, like her form; above all, take care that she has, in all her doings and thinkings, a clear eye for the fitting relations of things which make up what I call the symmetry of life.

How shall I explain it? Perhaps best by illustration, beginning with the root of all evil, and of a very great deal of good-money.

It may be a most immoral and unpoetical sentiment, but those are always the best people who have a carefulness over, and a wise respect for, money. Not per se-not the mere having it or amassing it—but the prudent using of it, making it our servant, and not our master. As a test of character, perhaps money is one of the sharpest and most sure. A man who is indifferent and inaccurate in money matters will be rarely found accurate in anything. He may have large benevolence, externally; you will see him throw a fifty-cent piece to a beggar, and subscribe to every charity list in the newspapers; but true charity consists, not in hasty acts of astonishing liberality, but in persistently managing one's expenses so that one has always a margin left wherewith to do a kindness; and if he forgets to pay you that two dollar bill he borrowed of you for hack-hire, you may be quite sure that the beggar's half dollar, and the hundred dollars in the printed subscription list, will have to come out of somebody's pocket--probably not his own. There is nothing like the meanness of your generous people, always robbing Peter to pay Paul. A liberal man is a glorious sight; but then he must be just as well as liberal, evenhanded as well as openhanded. His expenditure must be, like his character, justly balanced, and in due proportion. And since how to earn and how to spend are equally difficult arts, and that a large part of our usefulness, worthiness, and happiness depends on our learning them--aye, and they can not be learned too soon-is it wrong to put money as the crucial test of a well-regulated, well-balanced life?

My friend Smith has an income the exact amount of which is known to everybody. We also know that he has no private fortune, and that he had the manliness to marry a woman without a dollar to hers. Nevertheless, when he married he took a house the rent of which is out of all proportion to his income; and we know (somehow, everybody does know everything) that he and his expensively-dressed wife are continually in society, frequently have company to dinner, and generally ape the luxurious habits of people with four times their income. Therefore we shrewdly suspect that either they are getting deeply into debt, or that there are sharp economies practised somewhere, that their private fare is mean and innutritious, their home attire very shabby, and their upper rooms very poorly furnished and uninhabitable. Clearly the Smiths are living out of perspective. Smith is a thoroughly good fellow, too; he is a man who would rather starve than not pay his butcher; and his wife, though crazed with an inordinate anxiety to

* keep up the dignity' of her husband's house, as she phrases it, is really a good little, unaffected creature at heart: why should not two such worthy people take their stand in society upon higher ground than petty rivalry in meats and clothes? Why not say, openly or tacitly, We have just so much a year, and we mean to live accordingly. We enjoy society, but society must take us as we are. We will attempt

no make-believes; we will not feast one day and starve another; appear en grand tenue at our neighbour's house, and lounge about our own in shabbiness and rags; have a large, well-furnished, showy drawingroom to receive our company in, and let our family sleep in upper chambers bare and comfortless. Whatever we spend, we will spend levelly; then, be our income large or small, we shall always be rich, for we shall have apportioned expenditure to income. The man who is said to have an income of a thousand a day can do no more.

Not less unreal than the Smiths, or more devoid of that fine sense of the proportion of things which distinguishes a wise man from an unwise, is our other friend, Brown. He is a 'self-made man.' He and his wife began life in a second floor over their store in the street they never visit now. There, by steadfast industry, he developed from a tradesman to a merchant, from a merchant to a millionaire. Now, in all his wealthy mercantile city, no house is more palatial than the one built by Mr. B. When he gives a dinner party, his plate-glass and china dazzle your eyes; and his drawing-room, on these rare occasions when you are allowed to behold it, is the very perfection of the upholsterer's art. But, ordinarily, its carved marble chimney pieces gleam coldly over never-lighted fires; its satin damask is hid under brown. holland; its velvet-pile carpet you feel, but cannot see, not an inch of it, under the ugly drugget that covers all. The chandeliers, the mirrors, and picture-frames, nay, the very statues, are swathed in that dreadful gauzy substance, sticky, flimsy, and crackly, which must have been invented by the goddess of sham, as if anything not too good to buy was too good to use!

Yet even in this dreary condition the splendid apartments are seldom opened. Brown and his wife live mostly in their little back parlour, where are neither books, pictures, statues, nor handsome furniture; nothing pretty to delight the eye, nothing comfortable or luxurious to pleasure the old age of Brown himself or of excellent Mrs. Brown, who was such a faithful, hard-working wife to him in his poverty days, and who now richly deserves all that their well-earned wealth could give her. But alas! both had grown so used to narrowness that when good fortune came they could not expand with it. Save on show occasions,

they continue to live in the same unnaturally humble way, approaching actual meanness; as much below their income as Smith lives, or appears to live, above his; and both are equally wrong.

Poor old couple! They cannot see that riches were given to a man richly to enjoy, and, what is higher still, to help others to enjoy also. How many a young fellow with a full brain and an empty purse would keenly relish those treasures of art which the merchant prince buys so lavishly just because other peeple buy them, but does not understand nor appreciate one jot! How often some sickly invalid would feel it like a day in paradise to take a drive in Mrs. B's easy barouche, which, six days out of seven, stands idle in the coach-house! For she, with her active habits, prefers walking on fine days; or, afraid of spoiling the carriage or harming the horses, she has been seen tucking up her old black dress and popping surreptitiously into a horse-car. A noble economy, were there any need for it, but there is none. The childless couple had far better spend their income in making other folks' children happy. As it is, for all the use or benefit their wealth is to them, they might as well be living in those two little rooms over their first store; and that heap of countless dollars, which they can neither spend nor carry away with them, is, for all the enjoyment got out of it, of no more value to them than the dust-heap at their stable-door. Their folly is, in its way, as great as that of the spendthrift, and only a shade less sinful.

Money is, I repeat, the point upon which this want of balance in living most plainly shows itself. There are many other sad ways in which people may live out of proportion. Your great philanthropist, for instance, who devotes himself to one or more pet schemes for the improvement of the race, firmly convinced that his scheme is the only one, until it absorbs his whole time, and becomes, like the great black crow on the tree-top, a mere blot in the otherwise fair landscape of his life, and out of all proportion to the rest of it-how can he condescend to such small duties as to be the kind husband, whose smile makes the evening sunshine of the house; the affectionate father, who is at once the guide, companion, and confidant of his children? Your great author, too. It is a pathetic thing to see a wife sit smiling under the laurels of an illustrious husband, and

'Hear the nations praising him far off,'

while, near at home, she knows well that the praise never warms the silent hearth, from which he is continually absent, or, if he comes to it, only brings sulkiness and gloom. Alas! that shadow of fame