Praise Your Wife

Praise your Wife.

Praise your wife man; for pity's sake give her a little encouragement; it won't hurt her. She has made your home comfortable, your hearth bright and shining, your food agreeable; for pity's sake tell her you thank her, if nothing more. She don't expert it; it will make her eyes open wider than they have for these ten years, but it will do her good for all that, and you too.

There are many women to day thirst­ing for the word of praise, the language of encouragement. Through the Summer's heat and Winter's toil they have drudged uncomplainingly, and so accustomed have their fathers, brothers and husbands become to their monotonous labors, that they look for and upon them as they do daily rising of the sun and its daily going down. Homely every-day life may be made beautiful by an appreciation of its very homeliness. You know that if the door is clean, manual labor has been performed to make it so. You know that if you can take from your drawer a clean shirt whenever you want it, that somebody's fingers have ached in the toil of making it so fresh and agreeable, so smooth and lustrous. Everything that pleases the eye and the sense has been procured by constant work, much thought, great care and untiring efforts, bodily and mentally.

It is not that many men do not appre­ciate these things and feel a glow of grat­itude for the numberless attentions be­stowed upon them in sickness and in health, but they are so selfish in that feel­ing. They don't come out with a hear­ty, 'Why, how pleasant you make things look, wife!' or, 'I am obliged to you for taking so much pains!' They thank the tailor for giving them "fits," they thank the man in the omnibus who gives them a seat; they thank the young lady who moves along in the concert-room--in short, they thank everybody out of doors because it is the custom, and come home, tip their chairs hack and their heels up, pull out the newspaper, grumble if wife asks them to take the baby, scold if the fire has got down, or, if everything is just right shut their mouths with a smack of satisfaction but never say to her, "I thank you."

I tell you what, men young and old, if you did but show an ordinary civility toward those common articles of house­ keeping, your wives, if you gave the one hundred and sixtieth part of the compli­ments you almost choked them with be­fore they were married, if you would stop the badinage about who you are going to have when number one is dead, (such things wives may laugh at, but they sink deep sometimes,) if you would cease to speak of their faults, however banteringly, before others, fewer women would seek for other sources of happiness than your apparently cold, so-soish affection.--

Praise you wife, then, for all good qual­ities she has, and you may rest assured that her deficiencies are fully counterbal­anced by your own. --Olive Branch.