University of Virginia Library

3. III.
WHAT IS A HOME?

IT is among the sibylline secrets which lie mysteriously
between you and me, O reader, that
these papers, besides their public aspect, have a
private one proper to the bosom of mine own particular
family.

They are not merely an ex post facto protest in
regard to that carpet and parlor of celebrated memory,
but they are forth-looking towards other homes
that may yet arise near us.

For, among my other confidences, you may recollect
I stated to you that our Marianne was busy in
those interesting cares and details which relate to
the preparing and ordering of another dwelling.

Now, when any such matter is going on in a family,
I have observed that every feminine instinct is in a
state of fluttering vitality, — every woman, old or
young, is alive with womanliness to the tips of her
fingers; and it becomes us of the other sex, however
consciously respected, to walk softly and put
forth our sentiments discreetly and with due reverence

for the mysterious powers that reign in the
feminine breast.

I had been too well advised to offer one word of
direct counsel on a subject where there were such
charming voices, so able to convict me of absurdity
at every turn. I had merely so arranged my affairs
as to put into the hands of my bankers, subject to
my wife's order, the very modest marriage-portion
which I could place at my girl's disposal; and Marianne
and Jenny, unused to the handling of money,
were incessant in their discussions with ever-patient
mamma as to what was to be done with it. I say
Marianne and Jenny, for, though the case undoubtedly
is Marianne's, yet, like everything else in our
domestic proceedings, it seems to fall, somehow or
other, into Jenny's hands, through the intensity and
liveliness of her domesticity of nature. Little Jenny
is so bright and wide-awake, and with so many active
plans and fancies touching anything in the housekeeping
world, that, though the youngest sister, and
second party in this affair, a stranger, hearkening to
the daily discussions, might listen a half-hour at a
time without finding out that it was not Jenny's future
establishment that was in question. Marianne
is a soft, thoughtful, quiet girl, not given to many
words; and though, when you come fairly at it, you
will find, that, like most quiet girls, she has a will

five times as inflexible as one who talks more, yet
in all family counsels it is Jenny and mamma that
do the discussion, and her own little well-considered
“Yes,” or “No,” that finally settles each case.

I must add to this family tableau the portrait of
the excellent Bob Stephens, who figured as future
proprietor and householder in these consultations.
So far as the question of financial possibilities is
concerned, it is important to remark that Bob belongs
to the class of young Edmunds celebrated
by the poet: —

He is, in fact, an excellent-hearted and clever fellow,
with a world of agreeable talents, a good tenor
in a parlor-duet, a good actor at a charade, a lively,
off-hand conversationist, well up in all the current
literature of the day, and what is more, in my eyes,
a well-read lawyer, just admitted to the bar, and with
as fair business prospects as usually fall to the lot of
young aspirants in that profession.

Of course, he and my girl are duly and truly in
love, in all the proper moods and tenses; but as to
this work they have in hand of being householders,
managing fuel, rent, provision, taxes, gas- and water-rates,
they seem to my older eyes about as sagacious
as a pair of this year's robins. Nevertheless, as the

robins of each year do somehow learn to build nests
as well as their ancestors, there is reason to hope as
much for each new pair of human creatures. But it is
one of the fatalities of our ill-jointed life that houses
are usually furnished for future homes by young people
in just this state of blissful ignorance of what
they are really wanted for, or what is likely to be
done with the things in them.

Now, to people of large incomes, with ready
wealth for the rectification of mistakes, it does n't
much matter how the menage is arranged at first;
they will, if they have good sense, soon rid themselves
of the little infelicities and absurdities of
their first arrangements, and bring their establishment
to meet their more instructed tastes.

But to that greater class who have only a modest
investment for this first start in domestic life mistakes
are far more serious. I have known people
go on for years groaning under the weight of domestic
possessions they did not want, and pining in
vain for others which they did, simply from the fact
that all their first purchases were made in this time
of blissful ignorance.

I had been a quiet auditor to many animated discussions
among the young people as to what they
wanted, and were to get, in which the subject of
prudence and economy was discussed, with quotations

of advice thereon given in serious good-faith
by various friends and relations who lived easily on
incomes four or five times larger than our own. Who
can show the ways of elegant economy more perfectly
than people thus at ease in their possessions?
From what serene heights do they instruct the inexperienced
beginners! Ten thousand a year gives
one leisure for reflection, and elegant leisure enables
one to view household economics dispassionately;
hence the unction with which these gifted
daughters of upper-air delight to exhort young neophytes.

“Depend upon it, my dear,” Aunt Sophia Easygo
had said, “it 's always the best economy to get the
best things. They cost more in the beginning, but
see how they last! These velvet carpets on my
floor have been in constant wear for ten years, and
look how they wear! I never have an ingrain carpet
in my house, — not even on the chambers. Velvet
and Brussels cost more to begin with, but then
they last. Then I cannot recommend the fashion
that is creeping in, of having plate instead of solid
silver. Plate wears off, and has to be renewed,
which comes to about the same thing in the end
as if you bought all solid at first. If I were beginning
as Marianne is, I should just set aside a thousand
dollars for my silver, and be content with a

few plain articles. She should buy all her furniture
at Messrs. David and Saul's. People call them dear,
but their work will prove cheapest in the end, and
there is an air and style about their things that can
be told anywhere. Of course, you won't go to any
extravagant lengths, — simplicity is a grace of itself.”

The waters of the family council were troubled,
when Jenny, flaming with enthusiasm, brought home
the report of this conversation. When my wife proceeded,
with her well-trained business knowledge, to
compare the prices of the simplest elegancies recommended
by Aunt Easygo with the sum-total to be
drawn on, faces lengthened perceptibly.

“How are people to go to housekeeping,” said
Jenny, “if everything costs so much?”

My wife quietly remarked, that we had had great
comfort in our own home, — had entertained unnumbered
friends, and had only ingrain carpets on our
chambers and a three-ply on our parlor, and she
doubted if any guest had ever thought of it, — if
the rooms had been a shade less pleasant; and as
to durability, Aunt Easygo had renewed her carpets
oftener than we. Such as ours were, they had
worn longer than hers.

“But, mamma, you know everything has gone on
since your day. Everybody must at least approach
a certain style now-a-days. One can't furnish so far
behind other people.”

My wife answered in her quiet way, setting forth
her doctrine of a plain average to go through the
whole establishment, placing parlors, chambers, kitchen,
pantries, and the unseen depths of linen-closets in
harmonious relations of just proportion, and showed
by calm estimates how far the sum given could go
towards this result. There the limits were inexorable.
There is nothing so damping to the ardor of youthful
economies as the hard, positive logic of figures. It is
so delightful to think in some airy way that the things
we like best are the cheapest, and that a sort of rigorous
duty compels us to get them at any sacrifice.
There is no remedy for this illusion but to show by
the multiplication and addition tables what things are
and are not possible. My wife's figures met Aunt
Easygo's assertions, and there was a lull among the
high contracting parties for a season; nevertheless, I
could see Jenny was secretly uneasy. I began to hear
of journeys made to far places, here and there, where
expensive articles of luxury were selling at reduced
prices. Now a gilded mirror was discussed, and
now a velvet carpet which chance had brought down
temptingly near the sphere of financial possibility. I
thought of our parlor, and prayed the good fairies to
avert the advent of ill-assorted articles.

“Pray keep common sense uppermost in the girls'
heads, if you can,” said I to Mrs. Crowfield, “and

don't let the poor little puss spend her money for
what she won't care a button about by and by.”

“I shall try,” she said; “but you know Marianne
is inexperienced, and Jenny is so ardent and active,
and so confident, too. Then they both, I think, have
the impression that we are a little behind the age.
To say the truth, my dear, I think your papers afford
a good opportunity of dropping a thought now and
then in their minds. Jenny was asking last night
when you were going to write your next paper. The
girl has a bright, active mind, and thinks of what she
hears.”

So flattered, by the best of flatterers, I sat down
to write on my theme; and that evening, at fire-light
time, I read to my little senate as follows: —

What is a Home, and how to keep it.

I have shown that a dwelling, rented or owned by
a man, in which his own wife keeps house, is not
always, or of course, a home. What is it, then, that
makes a home? All men and women have the indefinite
knowledge of what they want and long for
when that word is spoken. “Home!” sighs the disconsolate
bachelor, tired of boarding-house fare and
buttonless shirts. “Home!” says the wanderer in
foreign lands, and thinks of mother's love, of wife

and sister and child. Nay, the word has in it a higher
meaning, hallowed by religion; and when the Christian
would express the highest of his hopes for a
better life, he speaks of his home beyond the grave.
The word home has in it the elements of love, rest,
permanency, and liberty; but besides these it has in
it the idea of an education by which all that is purest
within us is developed into nobler forms, fit for a
higher life. The little child by the home-fireside was
taken on the Master's knee when he would explain to
his disciples the mysteries of the kingdom.

Of so great dignity and worth is this holy and
sacred thing, that the power to create a HOME ought
to be ranked above all creative faculties. The sculptor
who brings out the breathing statue from cold
marble, the painter who warms the canvas into a
deathless glow of beauty, the architect who built cathedrals
and hung the world-like dome of St. Peter's
in mid-air, is not to be compared, in sanctity and
worthiness, to the humblest artist, who, out of the
poor materials afforded by this shifting, changing,
selfish world, creates the secure Eden of a home.

A true home should be called the noblest work of
art possible to human creatures, inasmuch as it is the
very image chosen to represent the last and highest
rest of the soul, the consummation of man's blessedness.

Not without reason does the oldest Christian church
require of those entering on marriage the most solemn
review of all the past life, the confession and
repentance of every sin of thought, word, and deed,
and the reception of the holy sacrament; for thus the
man and woman who approach the august duty of
creating a home are reminded of the sanctity and
beauty of what they undertake.

In this art of home-making I have set down in my
mind certain first principles, like the axioms of Euclid,
and the first is, —

No home is possible without love.

All business marriages and marriages of convenience,
all mere culinary marriages and marriages of
mere animal passion, make the creation of a true
home impossible in the outset. Love is the jewelled
foundation of this New Jerusalem descending from
God out of heaven, and takes as many bright forms
as the amethyst, topaz, and sapphire of that mysterious
vision. In this range of creative art all things
are possible to him that loveth, but without love
nothing is possible.

We hear of most convenient marriages in foreign
lands, which may better be described as commercial
partnerships. The money on each side is counted;
there is enough between the parties to carry on the
firm, each having the appropriate sum allotted to

each. No love is pretended, but there is great politeness.
All is so legally and thoroughly arranged,
that there seems to be nothing left for future quarrels
to fasten on. Monsieur and Madame have each their
apartments, their carriages, their servants, their income,
their friends, their pursuits, — understand the
solemn vows of marriage to mean simply that they
are to treat each other with urbanity in those few
situations where the path of life must necessarily bring
them together.

We are sorry that such an idea of marriage should
be gaining foothold in America. It has its root in an
ignoble view of life, — an utter and pagan darkness
as to all that man and woman are called to do in that
highest relation where they act as one. It is a mean
and low contrivance on both sides, by which all the
grand work of home-building, all the noble pains and
heroic toils of home-education, — that education where
the parents learn more than they teach, — shall be (let
us use the expressive Yankee idiom) shirked.

It is a curious fact that in those countries where
this system of marriages is the general rule there is
no word corresponding to our English word home. In
many polite languages of Europe it would be impossible
neatly to translate the sentiment with which we
began this essay, that a man's house is not always his
home.

Let any one try to render the song, “Sweet Home,”
into French, and one finds how Anglo-Saxon is the
very genius of the word. The structure of life, in all
its relations, in countries where marriages are matter
of arrangement, and not of love, excludes the idea of
home.

How does life run in such countries? The girl is
recalled from her convent or boarding-school, and told
that her father has found a husband for her. No objection
on her part is contemplated or provided for;
none generally occurs, for the child is only too happy
to obtain the fine clothes and the liberty which she
has been taught come only with marriage. Be the
man handsome or homely, interesting or stupid, still
he brings these.

How intolerable such a marriage! we say, with the
close intimacies of Anglo-Saxon life in our minds.
They are not intolerable, because they are provided
for by arrangements which make it possible for each
to go his or her several way, seeing very little of the
other. The son or daughter, which in due time makes
its appearance in this menage, is sent out to nurse
in infancy, sent to boarding-school in youth, and in
maturity portioned and married, to repeat the same
process for another generation. Meanwhile, father
and mother keep a quiet establishment, and pursue
their several pleasures. Such is the system.

Houses built for this kind of life become mere sets
of reception-rooms, such as are the greater proportion
of apartments to let in Paris, where a hearty English
or American family, with their children about them,
could scarcely find room to establish themselves.
Individual character, it is true, does something to
modify this programme. There are charming homes
in France and Italy, where warm and noble natures,
thrown together, perhaps, by accident, or mated by
wise paternal choice, infuse warmth into the coldness
of the system under which they live. There are in
all states of society some of such domesticity of
nature that they will create a home around themselves
under any circumstances, however barren. Besides,
so kindly is human nature, that Love uninvited
before marriage, often becomes a guest after, and with
Love always comes a home.

My next axiom is, —

There can be no true home without liberty.

The very idea of home is of a retreat where we
shall be free to act out personal and individual tastes
and peculiarities, as we cannot do before the wide
world. We are to have our meals at what hour we
will, served in what style suits us. Our hours of
going and coming are to be as we please. Our favorite
haunts are to be here or there, our pictures and
books so disposed as seems to us good, and our

whole arrangements the expression, so far as our
means can compass it, of our own personal ideas of
what is pleasant and desirable in life. This element
of liberty, if we think of it, is the chief charm of
home. “Here I can do as I please,” is the thought
with which the tempest-tossed earth-pilgrim blesses
himself or herself, turning inward from the crowded
ways of the world. This thought blesses the man of
business, as he turns from his day's care, and crosses
the sacred threshold. It is as restful to him as the
slippers and gown and easy-chair by the fireside.
Everybody understands him here. Everybody is well
content that he should take his ease in his own way.
Such is the case in the ideal home. That such is not
always the case in the real home comes often from
the mistakes in the house-furnishing. Much house-furnishing
is too fine for liberty.

In America there is no such thing as rank and
station which impose a sort of prescriptive style on
people of certain income. The consequence is that
all sorts of furniture and belongings, which in the Old
World have a recognized relation to certain possibilities
of income, and which require certain other accessories
to make them in good keeping, are thrown in
the way of all sorts of people.

Young people who cannot expect by any reasonable
possibility to keep more than two or three servants, if

they happen to have the means in the outset, furnish
a house with just such articles as in England would
suit an establishment of sixteen. We have seen
houses in England having two or three house-maids,
and tables served by a butler and two waiters, where
the furniture, carpets, china, crystal, and silver were
in one and the same style with some establishments
in America where the family was hard pressed to keep
three Irish servants.

This want of servants is the one thing that must
modify everything in American life; it is, and will long
continue to be, a leading feature in the life of a country
so rich in openings for man and woman that domestic
service can be only the stepping-stone to something
higher. Nevertheless, we Americans are great
travellers; we are sensitive, appreciative, fond of
novelty, apt to receive and incorporate into our own
life what seems fair and graceful in that of other people.
Our women's wardrobes are made elaborate with
the thousand elegancies of French toilet, — our houses
filled with a thousand knick-knacks of which our plain
ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail
on the Nile in more state and beauty than that in
which our young American bride is often ushered into
her new home. Her wardrobe all gossamer lace and
quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a
museum of elegant and costly gewgaws; and amid

the whole collection of elegancies and fragilities, she,
perhaps, the frailest.

Then comes the tug of war. The young wife becomes
a mother, and while she is retired to her chamber,
blundering Biddy rusts the elegant knives, or
takes off the ivory handles by soaking in hot water,
—the silver is washed in greasy soap-suds, and refreshed
now and then with a thump, which cocks the
nose of the teapot awry, or makes the handle assume
an air of drunken defiance. The fragile China is
chipped here and there around its edges with those
minute gaps so vexatious to a woman's soul; the
handles fly hither and thither in the wild confusion
of Biddy's washing-day hurry, when cook wants her
to help hang out the clothes. Meanwhile, Bridget
sweeps the parlor with a hard broom, and shakes out
showers of ashes from the grate, forgetting to cover
the damask lounges, and they directly look as rusty
and time-worn as if they had come from an auction-store;
and all together unite in making such havoc
of the delicate ruffles and laces of the bridal outfit
and baby-layette, that, when the poor young wife comes
out of her chamber after her nurse has left her, and,
weakened and embarrassed with the demands of
the new-comer, begins to look once more into the
affairs of her little world, she is ready to sink with
vexation and discouragement. Poor little princess!

Her clothes are made as princesses wear them, her
baby's clothes like a young duke's, her house furnished
like a lord's, and only Bridget and Biddy and
Polly to do the work of cook, scullery-maid, butler,
footman, laundress, nursery-maid, house-maid, and
lady's maid. Such is the array that in the Old Country
would be deemed necessary to take care of an
establishment got up like hers. Everything in it is
too fine, — not too fine to be pretty, not in bad taste
in itself, but too fine for the situation, too fine for
comfort or liberty.

What ensues in a house so furnished? Too often
ceaseless fretting of the nerves, in the wife's despairing,
conscientious efforts to keep things as they
should be. There is no freedom in a house where
things are too expensive and choice to be freely
handled and easily replaced. Life becomes a series
of petty embarrassments and restrictions, something
is always going wrong, and the man finds his fireside
oppressive, — the various articles of his parlor and
table seem like so many temper-traps and spring-guns,
menacing explosion and disaster.

There may be, indeed, the most perfect home-feeling,
the utmost coseyness and restfulness, in apartments
crusted with gilding, carpeted with velvet, and
upholstered with satin. I have seen such, where the
home-like look and air of free use was as genuine as

in a Western log-cabin; but this was in a range of
princely income that made all these things as easy to
be obtained or replaced as the most ordinary of our
domestic furniture. But so long as articles must be
shrouded from use, or used with fear and trembling,
because their cost is above the general level of our
means, we had better be without them, even though
the most lucky of accidents may put their possession
in our power.

But it is not merely by the effort to maintain too
much elegance that the sense of home-liberty is banished
from a house. It is sometimes expelled in
another way, with all painstaking and conscientious
strictness, by the worthiest and best of human beings,
the blessed followers of Saint Martha. Have we not
known them, the dear, worthy creatures, up before
daylight, causing most scrupulous lustrations of every
pane of glass and inch of paint in our parlors, in
consequence whereof every shutter and blind must
be kept closed for days to come, lest the flies should
speck the freshly washed windows and wainscoting?
Dear shade of Aunt Mehitabel, forgive our boldness?
Have we not been driven for days, in our youth, to
read our newspaper in the front veranda, in the
kitchen, out in the barn, — anywhere, in fact, where
sunshine could be found, because there was not a
room in the house that was not cleaned, shut up,

and darkened? Have we not shivered with cold,
all the glowering, gloomy month of May, because
the august front-parlor having undergone the spring
cleaning, the andirons were snugly tied up in the
tissue-paper, and an elegant frill of the same material
was trembling before the mouth of the once
glowing fireplace? Even so, dear soul, full of loving-kindness
and hospitality as thou wast, yet ever
making our house seem like a tomb! And with
what patience wouldst thou sit sewing by a crack
in the shutters, an inch wide, rejoicing in thy immaculate
paint and clear glass! But was there ever
a thing of thy spotless and unsullied belongings
which a boy might use? How I trembled to touch
thy scoured tins, that hung in appalling brightness!
with what awe I asked for a basket to pick strawberries!
and where in the house could I find a place
to eat a piece of gingerbread? How like a ruffian,
a Tartar, a pirate, I always felt, when I entered thy
domains! and how, from day to day, I wondered at
the immeasurable depths of depravity which were
always leading me to upset something, or break or
tear or derange something, in thy exquisitely kept
premises! Somehow, the impression was burned
with overpowering force into my mind, that houses
and furniture, scrubbed floors, white curtains, bright
tins and brasses were the great, awful, permanent
facts of existence, — and that men and women, and
particularly children, were the meddlesome intruders
upon this divine order, every trace of whose intermeddling
must be scrubbed out and obliterated in
the quickest way possible. It seemed evident to
me that houses would be far more perfect, if nobody
lived in them at all; but that, as men had
really and absurdly taken to living in them, they
must live as little as possible. My only idea of a
house was a place full of traps and pitfalls for boys,
a deadly temptation to sins which beset one every
moment; and when I read about a sailor's free life
on the ocean, I felt an untold longing to go forth
and be free in like manner.

But a truce to these fancies, and back again to our
essay.

If liberty in a house is a comfort to a husband, it
is a necessity to children. When we say liberty, we
do not mean license. We do not mean that Master
Johnny be allowed to handle elegant volumes with
bread-and-butter fingers, or that little Miss be suffered
to drum on the piano, or practise line-drawing
with a pin on varnished furniture. Still it is essential
that the family-parlors be not too fine for the
family to sit in, — too fine for the ordinary accidents,
haps and mishaps, of reasonably well-trained children.
The elegance of the parlor where papa and mamma

sit and receive their friends should wear an inviting,
not a hostile and bristling, aspect to little people.
Its beauty and its order gradually form in the little
mind a love of beauty and order, and the insensible
carefulness of regard.

Nothing is worse for a child than to shut him up
in a room which he understands is his, because he is
disorderly, — where he is expected, of course, to maintain
and keep disorder. We have sometimes pitied
the poor little victims who show their faces longingly
at the doors of elegant parlors, and are forthwith collared
by the domestic police and consigned to some
attic-apartment, called a play-room, where chaos continually
reigns. It is a mistake to suppose, because
children derange a well-furnished apartment, that they
like confusion. Order and beauty are always pleasant
to them as to grown people, and disorder and defacement
are painful; but they know neither how to create
the one nor to prevent the other, — their little
lives are a series of experiments, often making disorder
by aiming at some new form of order. Yet,
for all this, I am not one of those who feel that
in a family everything should bend to the sway of
these little people. They are the worst of tyrants
in such houses, — still, where children are, though
the fact must not appear to them, nothing must be
done without a wise thought of them.

Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force,
“Ars est celare artem.” Children who are taught too
plainly by every anxious look and word of their parents,
by every family arrangement, by the impressment
of every chance guest into the service, that
their parents consider their education as the one
important matter in creation, are apt to grow up
fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious.
The stars cannot stop in their courses, even for our
personal improvement, and the sooner children learn
this, the better. The great art is to organize a home
which shall move on with a strong, wide, generous
movement, where the little people shall act themselves
out as freely and impulsively as can consist
with the comfort of the whole, and where the anxious
watching and planning for them shall be kept
as secret from them as possible.

It is well that one of the sunniest and airiest rooms
in the house be the children's nursery. It is good
philosophy, too, to furnish it attractively, even if the
sum expended lower the standard of parlor-luxuries.
It is well that the children's chamber, which is to
act constantly on their impressible natures for years,
should command a better prospect, a sunnier aspect,
than one which serves for a day's occupancy of the
transient guest. It is well that journeys should be
made or put off in view of the interests of the children,

— that guests should be invited with a view to
their improvement, — that some intimacies should be
chosen and some rejected on their account. But it
is not well that all this should, from infancy, be daily
talked out before the child, and he grow up in egotism
from moving in a sphere where everything from first
to last is calculated and arranged with reference to
himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect
combined with real care and never-ceasing watchfulness
has often seemed to do wonders in this work
of setting human beings on their own feet for the
life-journey.

Education is the highest object of home, but education
in the widest sense, — education of the parents
no less than of the children. In a true home the
man and the woman receive, through their cares,
their watchings, their hospitality, their charity, the
last and highest finish that earth can put upon them.
From that they must pass upward, for earth can teach
them no more.

The home-education is incomplete, unless it include
the idea of hospitality and charity. Hospitality is a
Biblical and apostolic virtue, and not so often recommended
in Holy Writ without reason. Hospitality
is much neglected in America for the very reasons
touched upon above. We have received our ideas
of propriety and elegance of living from old countries,

where labor is cheap, where domestic service
is a well-understood, permanent occupation, adopted
cheerfully for life, and where of course there is such
a subdivision of labor as insures great thoroughness
in all its branches. We are ashamed or afraid to
conform honestly and hardily to a state of things
purely American. We have not yet accomplished
what our friend the Doctor calls “our weaning,” and
learned that dinners with circuitous courses and
divers other Continental and English refinements,
well enough in their way, cannot be accomplished
in families with two or three untrained servants, without
an expense of care and anxiety which makes them
heart-withering to the delicate wife, and too severe a
trial to occur often. America is the land of subdivided
fortunes, of a general average of wealth and
comfort, and there ought to be, therefore, an understanding
in the social basis far more simple than in
the Old World.

Many families of small fortunes know this, — they
are quietly living so, — but they have not the steadiness
to share their daily average living with a friend,
a traveller, or guest, just as the Arab shares his tent
and the Indian his bowl of succotash. They cannot
have company, they say. Why? Because it is such
a fuss to get out the best things, and then to put
them back again. But why get out the best things?

Why not give your friend, what he would like a thousand
times better, a bit of your average home-life, a
seat at any time at your board, a seat at your fire?
If he sees that there is a handle off your teacup,
and that there is a crack across one of your plates,
he only thinks, with a sigh of relief, “Well, mine are n't
the only things that meet with accidents,” and he feels
nearer to you ever after; he will let you come to his
table and see the cracks in his teacups, and you will
condole with each other on the transient nature of
earthly possessions. If it become apparent in these
entirely undressed rehearsals that your children are
sometimes disorderly, and that your cook sometimes
overdoes the meat, and that your second girl sometimes
is awkward in waiting, or has forgotten a table
propriety, your friend only feels, “Ah, well, other
people have trials as well as I,” and he thinks, if you
come to see him, he shall feel easy with you.

“Having company” is an expense that may always
be felt; but easy daily hospitality, the plate always on
your table for a friend, is an expense that appears on
no account-book, and a pleasure that is daily and constant.

Under this head of hospitality, let us suppose a
case. A traveller comes from England; he comes in
good faith and good feeling to see how Americans
live. He merely wants to penetrate into the interior

of domestic life, to see what there is genuinely and
peculiarly American about it. Now here is Smilax,
who is living, in a small, neat way, on his salary from
the daily press. He remembers hospitalities received
from our traveller in England, and wants to return
them. He remembers, too, with dismay, a well-kept
establishment, the well-served table, the punctilious,
orderly servants. Smilax keeps two, a cook and
chambermaid, who divide the functions of his establishment
between them. What shall he do? Let him
say, in a fair, manly way, “My dear fellow, I 'm delighted
to see you. I live in a small way, but I 'll do
my best for you, and Mrs. Smilax will be delighted.
Come and dine with us, so and so, and we 'll bring in
one or two friends.” So the man comes, and Mrs.
Smilax serves up such a dinner as lies within the
limits of her knowledge and the capacities of her
servants. All plain, good of its kind, unpretending,
without an attempt to do anything English or French,
— to do anything more than if she were furnishing a
gala-dinner for her father or returned brother. Show
him your house freely, just as it is, talk to him freely
of it, just as he in England showed you his larger
house and talked to you of his finer things. If the
man is a true man, he will thank you for such unpretending,
sincere welcome; if he is a man of straw,
then he is not worth wasting Mrs. Smilax's health and
spirits for, in unavailing efforts to get up a foreign
dinner-party.

A man who has any heart in him values a genuine,
little bit of home more than anything else you can give
him. He can get French cooking at a restaurant; he
can buy expensive wines at first-class hotels, if he
wants them; but the traveller, though ever so rich and
ever so well-served at home, is, after all, nothing but
a man as you are, and he is craving something that
does n't seem like an hotel, — some bit of real, genuine
heart-life. Perhaps he would like better than
anything to show you the last photograph of his wife,
or to read to you the great, round-hand letter of his
ten-year-old which he has got to-day. He is ready to
cry when he thinks of it. In this mood he goes to
see you, hoping for something like home, and you
first receive him in a parlor opened only on state
occasions, and that has been circumstantially and
exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures you, as
every other parlor of the kind in the city is furnished.
You treat him to a dinner got up for the occasion,
with hired waiters, — a dinner which it has taken
Mrs. Smilax a week to prepare for, and will take her
a week to recover from, — for which the baby has
been snubbed and turned off, to his loud indignation,
and your young four-year-old sent to his aunts. Your
traveller eats your dinner, and finds it inferior, as a

work of art, to other dinners, — a poor imitation. He
goes away and criticises; you hear of it, and resolve
never to invite a foreigner again. But if you had
given him a little of your heart, a little home-warmth
and feeling, — if you had shown him your baby, and
let him romp with your four-year-old, and eat a genuine
dinner with you, — would he have been false to
that? Not so likely. He wanted something real and
human, — you gave him a bad dress-rehearsal, and
dress-rehearsals always provoke criticism.

Besides hospitality, there is, in a true home, a mission
of charity. It is a just law which regulates the
possession of great or beautiful works of art in the
Old World, that they shall in some sense be considered
the property of all who can appreciate. Fine
grounds have hours when the public may be admitted,
— pictures and statues may be shown to visitors; and
this is a noble charity. In the same manner the fortunate
individuals who have achieved the greatest of
all human works of art should employ it as a sacred
charity. How many, morally wearied, wandering, disabled,
are healed and comforted by the warmth of a
true home! When a mother has sent her son to the
temptations of a distant city, what news is so glad to
her heart as that he has found some quiet family
where he visits often and is made to feel AT HOME?
How many young men have good women saved from

temptation and shipwreck by drawing them often to
the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor artist,
— the wandering genius who has lost his way in this
world, and stumbles like a child among hard realities,
— the many men and women who, while they have
houses, have no homes, — see from afar, in their distant,
bleak life-journey, the light of a true home-fire,
and, if made welcome there, warm their stiffened
limbs, and go forth stronger to their pilgrimage. Let
those who have accomplished this beautiful and perfect
work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let
them not seek to bolt the doors and draw the curtains;
for they know not, and will never know till the
future life, of the good they may do by the ministration
of this great charity of home.

We have heard much lately of the restricted sphere
of woman. We have been told how many spirits
among women are of a wider, stronger, more heroic
mould than befits the mere routine of housekeeping.
It may be true that there are many women far too
great, too wise, too high, for mere housekeeping.
But where is the woman in any way too great or too
high, or too wise, to spend herself in creating a
home? What can any woman make diviner, higher,
better? From such homes go forth all heroisms, all
inspirations, all great deeds. Such mothers and such
homes have made the heroes and martyrs, faithful

unto death, who have given their precious lives to us
during these three years of our agony!

Homes are the work of art peculiar to the genius
of woman. Man helps in this work, but woman leads;
the hive is always in confusion without the queen-bee.
But what a woman must she be who does this work
perfectly! She comprehends all, she balances and
arranges all; all different tastes and temperaments
find in her their rest, and she can unite at one hearthstone
the most discordant elements. In her is order,
yet an order ever veiled and concealed by indulgence.
None are checked, reproved, abridged of privileges
by her love of system; for she knows that order was
made for the family, and not the family for order.
Quietly she takes on herself what all others refuse or
overlook. What the unwary disarrange she silently
rectifies. Everybody in her sphere breathes easy,
feels free; and the driest twig begins in her sunshine
to put out buds and blossoms. So quiet are her
operations and movements, that none sees that it is
she who holds all things in harmony; only, alas,
when she is gone, how many things suddenly appear
disordered, inharmonious, neglected! All these
threads have been smilingly held in her weak hand.
Alas, if that is no longer there!

Can any woman be such a housekeeper without
inspiration? No. In the words of the old church-service,

“Her soul must ever have affiance in God.”
The New Jerusalem of a perfect home cometh down
from God out of heaven. But to make such a home
is ambition high and worthy enough for any woman,
be she what she may.

One thing more. Right on the threshold of all perfection
lies the cross to be taken up. No one can go
over or around that cross in science or in art. Without
labor and self-denial neither Raphael nor Michel
Angelo nor Newton was made perfect. Nor can man
or woman create a true home who is not willing in the
outset to embrace life heroically, to encounter labor
and sacrifice. Only to such shall this divinest power
be given to create on earth that which is the nearest
image of heaven.