CHAPTER XVII.

EARLY RISING.

The young wife should rise early. Means of forming the habit. Retire early-with a quiet stomach-a quiet mind. Resolve strongly. Early training. Mr. and Mrs. Clifford. Samuel Sidney. Reflections.

THE young wife should be an early riser. Early rising is, indeed, a prominent duty of all; but it is especially incumbent on those who influence, direct, and control a family-even if that family consist of no more than the wife and her husband. For it sometimes happens that the husband needs the example of his wife to rouse him. There are those who never learn this important habit till they learn it of their wives; and wo be to those who lose, by the indolence of the latter, this only remaining chance of reformation.

I trust I need not dwell, here, on the importance of early rising, in the abstract. This matter, as it appears to me, has been treated with sufficient ability and minuteness elsewhere. I know not how any person can resist the united arguments in favor of the practice. I know not how a conscien

tious person-especially a christian-can continue to lie in bed late in the morning, when he knows perfectly well that it is injurious to his health, that it involves an actual loss of pleasure, and a great waste of time and property.

But how shall one who has been trained otherwise acquire this invaluable habit?

1. She should retire early the previous night. Whatever number of hours she allots herselfwhether six, seven or eight-let her by all means be in bed and asleep soon enough to give her that number of hours for actual sleep, before the arrival of the period at which she proposes to rise. If she proposes to rise at four o'clock, and believes she needs seven hours for sleep, let her be sure of being in bed so much before nine as to be sound asleep by that hour.

There are many, who, in the last mentioned. circumstances, would never think of going to bed till the clock had actually struck nine. Then something remains to be done, and perhaps is done in a hurry; and it is doubtful whether the individual gets to bed before half past nine, or to sleep before ten. Now this will never do. No person will, in this way, ever acquire the habit of rising at his appointed early hour. That order and method which I have recommended in a preceding chapter, must come in here, to prevent any

such delay or protraction of the evening labors as shall stand in the way of going to bed quietly at the proper time.

2. She should retire with a quiet stomach and nervous system. She must not think to eat a hearty supper, one, or two, or even three hours before she retires; for though a meal of wholesome and proper food may be digested, and the stomach emptied, in three hours in the morning, it may not be so in the evening, when we are fatigued. She must not only avoid a late hearty supper, but she ought indeed to avoid taking anything whatever, unless it be water, for at least two or three hours before retiring. The person who retires by nine, should not take supper later than six. She should especially avoid, at this hour, things which are indigestible, or otherwise improper.

The observance of this last rule may exclude her, if she lives in the city, from convivial parties in the evening, which begin at a late hour. Now there is no sort of objection to having a few neighbors meet in the evening, for social conversation or other purposes, provided they do not continue so late that it interferes with their usual hour of retiring;-on the contrary, I think it may be highly conducive to health and happiness. But the growing custom of our cities-and I fear the custom is extending beyond the city-of having large parties

which do not commence before eight or nine o'clock, and which include oysters, or "tongues," or wine, or all these and many more abominations, is one that should not be so much as named in a community of people calling themselves christians; even if it be encouraged as I hear it is in some instances by those who have reputation and influence.*

3. She should retire with a quiet mind. Now the convivial parties, and the refreshments-so called-which they furnish, and the state of the nervous system and brain which they induce, have most undoubtedly a powerful agency in producing mental inquietude, or at least in discomposing and disturbing the mind. The very excitement of a large company, if nothing improper is taken into the stomach, will do this. But when food is taken at this late hour, and after a previous evening meal, and when wine, and above all, those common narcotic medicines, tea and coffee, are used,

* I know what is the common defence of theşe enormities. I know we are told how fully employed people are during the day, and how seldom they would associate were it not for this custom. But they have no right, as christians, to be thus constantly employed, in the first place; and in the second place, the practice defeats its own object, by seeming to give people full license to keep aloof from each other at all other times. There are no greater real strangers to each other than those who attend fashionable parties.

the mental excitement, and consequent mental inquietude, are greatly increased.

There may, however, be an excited mind from causes independent of all these. There may be cares of the family, or cares of some other kind, which are preying upon the brain and nervous system, and which, if they permit sleep, do not permit that which is truly quiet, sound and refreshing. It is disturbed by dreams; or, still worse, it is broken by nightmare, or by nervous twitchings or spasms; and we rise unrefreshed and unhappy.

Nothing is more common than for people to rise in the morning with bad feelings in the head or stomach, or with a bad taste in the mouth. And yet nothing is more certain than that whenever this does happen, there has been some dietetic error-something wrong in eating or drinking, or both. The causes may, indeed, in part, lie a great way back, in errors which were at least begun months or years before; and which it may take months and years of a correct course to cure. But error there must have been, I say again, somewhere.

4. The young mistress of a family, who desires not only to do her own duty thoroughly to God and her fellow men, but to set a worthy example to her family, and to begin that example betimes, must not only attend to all the suggestions of the