due time, a very comfortable breakfast was prepared by her own
hands. Mr. Uhler ventured a word of praise, as he sipped his coffee.
Never had he tasted finer in his life, he said. Mrs. Uhler looked
gratified; but offered no response.

At dinner time Mr. Uhler came home from the store, where he was now
employed at a small salary, and still more to his surprise, found a
well cooked and well served meal awaiting him. Never, since his
marriage, had he eaten food at his own table with so true a
relish--never before had every thing in his house seemed so much
like home.

And so things went on for a week, Mr. Uhler wondering and observant,
and Mrs. Uhler finding her own sweet reward, not only in a
consciousness of duty, but in seeing a great change in her husband,
who was no longer moody and ill-natured, and who had not been absent
once at meal time, nor during an evening, since she had striven to
be to him a good wife, and to her children a self denying mother.

There came, now, to be a sort of tacit emulation of good offices
between the wife and husband, who had, for so many years, lived in a
state of partial indifference. Mr. Uhler urged the procuring of a
domestic, in place of the girl who had left them, but Mrs. Uhler
said no--their circumstances would not justify the expense. Mr.
Uhler said they could very well afford it, and intimated something
about an expected advance in his salary.

"I do not wish to see you a mere household drudge," he said to her
one day, a few weeks after the change just noted. "You know so well
how every thing ought to be done, that the office of director alone