As We Journey Along the Road. A Poem · Improvement Era

As We Journey Along the Road

It isn't the things we say, dear, Nor the things we idly dream; It's the things we do every day, dear, That carry us up the stream. It isn't the tears we shed, dear, O'er things which are past and gone; It's the tug at the oar, For the sunny shore, That carries us on and on.

It isn't the flowers which have blushed, dear. And died on life's thorny way; It isn't the songs that are hushed, dear, That gladden our hearts today; It isn't the love that is dead, dear, That lightens life's weary load, It's the flower, and the song, And the love full strong, As we journey along the road. Theodore E. Curtis.

Little Problems of Married Life.'

BY WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN

XVII — When the Family Interferes Many a good matrimonial ship, with its sunlit cargo of happiness and hope, has been wrecked on the rocks of family interference. If it were customary to erect tombstones to the memory

of dead loves, the cause of the death of marital happiness in thousands of homes might be given in the chiselled epitaph : "Died !" from an Overdose of the Interference of Relatives If there be one place in the world where the justice of "Home — Rule" should be unquestioned, that place is the home. Marriage makes the couple a new firm, an independent partnership, not a branch house under the management of a parent company. It is a home trust controlled by two. No matter how loving, kind, solicitous and anxious the family of either partner may be for the success of the new firm, they must realize that they do not own it, that they are not stockholders, are not on the board of directors and must not interfere in the management. They may stand ready and willing to give loving counsel, sympathetic suggestion, and help and service in any emergency when needed and desired, but it is unwarranted to interfere. unfair, unnecessary, was interference and bad advice that spoiled the first mar- It

riage, started the first quarrel, and broke up the first home in the world in those early days, long, long ago when Eden was the only spot on earth that had even a name. This was the first lesson to man, and now after sixty centuries some people have not learned it yet. Husband and wife must work out their own problems in their own way. They must do it by the best light of their united wisdom, not by the flickering torches of obtruded advice from the family. They must convert their experiments into experience, transmute little failures into great successes and little failings into