University of Virginia Library

1. I.
THE RAVAGES OF A CARPET.

“MY dear, it 's so cheap!”

These words were spoken by my wife, as
she sat gracefully on a roll of Brussels carpet which
was spread out in flowery lengths on the floor of
Messrs. Ketchem & Co.

“It 's so cheap!”

Milton says that the love of fame is the last infirmity
of noble minds. I think he had not rightly
considered the subject. I believe that last infirmity
is the love of getting things cheap! Understand me,
now. I don't mean the love of getting cheap things,
by which one understands showy, trashy, ill-made,
spurious articles, bearing certain apparent resemblances
to better things. All really sensible people
are quite superior to that sort of cheapness. But
those fortunate accidents which put within the power
of a man things really good and valuable for half or
a third of their value what mortal virtue and resolution

can withstand? My friend Brown has a genuine
Murillo, the joy of his heart and the light of his eyes,
but he never fails to tell you, as its crowning merit,
how he bought it in South America for just nothing,
— how it hung smoky and deserted in the back of a
counting-room, and was thrown in as a makeweight to
bind a bargain, and, upon being cleaned, turned out
a genuine Murillo; and then he takes out his cigar,
and calls your attention to the points in it; he adjusts
the curtain to let the sunlight fall just in the right
spot; he takes you to this and the other point of
view; and all this time you must confess, that, in
your mind as well as his, the consideration that he
got all this beauty for ten dollars adds lustre to the
painting. Brown has paintings there for which he
paid his thousands, and, being well advised, they are
worth the thousands he paid; but this ewe-lamb that
he got for nothing always gives him a secret exaltation
in his own eyes. He seems to have credited to himself
personally merit to the amount of what he should
have paid for the picture. Then there is Mrs. Crœsus,
at the party yesterday evening, expatiating to my wife
on the surprising cheapness of her point-lace set, —
“Got for just nothing at all, my dear!” and a circle
of admiring listeners echoes the sound. “Did you
ever hear anything like it? I never heard of such a
thing in my life”; and away sails Mrs. Crœsus as if
she had a collar composed of all the cardinal virtues.
In fact, she is buoyed up with a secret sense of merit,
so that her satin slippers scarcely touch the carpet.
Even I myself am fond of showing a first edition of
“Paradise Lost,” for which I gave a shilling in a
London book-stall, and stating that I would not take
a hundred dollars for it. Even I must confess there
are points on which I am mortal.

But all this while my wife sits on her roll of carpet,
looking into my face for approbation, and Marianne
and Jenny are pouring into my ear a running-fire
of “How sweet! How lovely! Just like that one
of Mrs. Tweedleum's!”

“And she gave two dollars and seventy-five cents a
yard for hers, and this is —”

My wife here put her hand to her mouth, and
pronounced the incredible sum in a whisper, with a
species of sacred awe, common, as I have observed,
to females in such interesting crises. In fact, Mr.
Ketchem, standing smiling and amiable by, remarked
to me that really he hoped Mrs. Crowfield would not
name generally what she gave for the article, for positively
it was so far below the usual rate of prices that
he might give offence to other customers; but this
was the very last of the pattern, and they were anxious
to close off the old stock, and we had always
traded with them, and he had a great respect for my

wife's father, who had always traded with their firm,
and so, when there were any little bargains to be
thrown in any one's way, why, he naturally, of
course — And here Mr. Ketchem bowed gracefully
over the yardstick to my wife, and I consented.

Yes, I consented; but whenever I think of myself
at that moment, I always am reminded, in a
small way, of Adam taking the apple; and my wife,
seated on that roll of carpet, has more than once
suggested to my mind the classic image of Pandora
opening her unlucky box. In fact, from the moment
I had blandly assented to Mr. Ketchem's remarks,
and said to my wife, with a gentle air of dignity,
“Well, my dear, since it suits you, I think you had
better take it,” there came a load on my prophetic
soul, which not all the fluttering and chattering of
my delighted girls and the more placid complacency
of my wife could entirely dissipate. I presaged, I
know not what, of coming woe; and all I presaged
came to pass.

In order to know just what came to pass, I must
give you a view of the house and home into which
this carpet was introduced.

My wife and I were somewhat advanced housekeepers,
and our dwelling was first furnished by her
father, in the old-fashioned jog-trot days, when furniture

was made with a view to its lasting from generation
to generation. Everything was strong and
comfortable, — heavy mahogany, guiltless of the modern
device of veneering, and hewed out with a square
solidity which had not an idea of change. It was,
so to speak, a sort of granite foundation of the household
structure. Then, we commenced housekeeping
with the full idea that our house was a thing to be
lived in, and that furniture was made to be used.
That most sensible of women, Mrs. Crowfield, agreed
fully with me, that in our house there was to be nothing
too good for ourselves, — no rooms shut up in
holiday attire to be enjoyed by strangers for three
or four days in the year, while we lived in holes and
corners, — no best parlor from which we were to be
excluded, — no silver plate to be kept in the safe in
the bank, and brought home only in case of a grand
festival, while our daily meals were served with dingy
Britannia. “Strike a broad, plain average,” I said
to my wife; “have everything abundant, serviceable;
and give all our friends exactly what we have ourselves,
no better and no worse”; — and my wife
smiled approval on my sentiment.

Smile! she did more than smile. My wife resembles
one of those convex mirrors I have sometimes
seen. Every idea I threw out, plain and simple, she
reflected back upon me in a thousand little glitters

and twinkles of her own; she made my crude conceptions
come back to me in such perfectly dazzling
performances that I hardly recognized them. My
mind warms up, when I think what a home that woman
made of our house from the very first day she
moved into it. The great, large, airy parlor, with its
ample bow-window, when she had arranged it, seemed
a perfect trap to catch sunbeams. There was none
of that discouraging trimness and newness that often
repel a man's bachelor-friends after the first call, and
make them feel, — “O, well, one cannot go in at
Crowfield's now, unless one is dressed; one might
put them out.” The first thing our parlor said to
any one was, that we were not people to be put out,
that we were wide-spread, easy-going, and jolly folk.
Even if Tom Brown brought in Ponto and his shooting-bag,
there was nothing in that parlor to strike
terror into man and dog; for it was written on the
face of things, that everybody there was to do just
as he or she pleased. There were my books and
my writing-table spread out with all its miscellaneous
confusion of papers on one side of the fireplace, and
there were my wife's great, ample sofa and work-table
on the other; there I wrote my articles for the
“North American,” and there she turned and ripped
and altered her dresses, and there lay crochet and
knitting and embroidery side by side with a weekly
basket of family-mending, and in neighborly contiguity
with the last book of the season, which my wife
turned over as she took her after-dinner lounge on
the sofa. And in the bow-window were canaries
always singing, and a great stand of plants always
fresh and blooming, and ivy which grew and clambered
and twined about the pictures. Best of all,
there was in our parlor that household altar, the
blazing wood-fire, whose wholesome, hearty crackle
is the truest household inspiration. I quite agree
with one celebrated American author who holds that
an open fireplace is an altar of patriotism. Would
our Revolutionary fathers have gone barefooted and
bleeding over snows to defend air-tight stoves and
cooking-ranges? I trow not. It was the memory of
the great open kitchen-fire, with its back-log and forestick
of cord-wood, its roaring, hilarious voice of
invitation, its dancing tongues of flame, that called
to them through the snows of that dreadful winter to
keep up their courage, that made their hearts warm
and bright with a thousand reflected memories. Our
neighbors said that it was delightful to sit by our fire,
— but then, for their part, they could not afford it,
wood was so ruinously dear, and all that. Most of
these people could not, for the simple reason that
they felt compelled, in order to maintain the family-dignity,
to keep up a parlor with great pomp and
circumstance of upholstery, where they sat only on
dress-occasions, and of course the wood-fire was out
of the question.

When children began to make their appearance in
our establishment, my wife, like a well-conducted
housekeeper, had the best of nursery-arrangements,
— a room all warmed, lighted, and ventilated, and
abounding in every proper resource of amusement to
the rising race; but it was astonishing to see how,
notwithstanding this, the centripetal attraction drew
every pair of little pattering feet to our parlor.

“My dear, why don't you take your blocks up-stairs?”

“I want to be where oo are,” said with a piteous
under-lip, was generally a most convincing answer.

Then the small people could not be disabused of
the idea that certain chief treasures of their own
would be safer under papa's writing-table or mamma's
sofa than in the safest closet of their own domains.
My writing-table was dock-yard for Arthur's new
ship, and stable for little Tom's pepper-and-salt-colored
pony, and carriage-house for Charley's new
wagon, while whole armies of paper-dolls kept house
in the recess behind mamma's sofa.

And then, in due time, came the tribe of pets who
followed the little ones and rejoiced in the blaze of
the firelight. The boys had a splendid Newfoundland,

which, knowing our weakness, we warned them
with awful gravity was never to be a parlor dog; but,
somehow, what with little beggings and pleadings on
the part of Arthur and Tom, and the piteous melancholy
with which Rover would look through the window-panes,
when shut out from the blazing warmth
into the dark, cold, veranda, it at last came to pass
that Rover gained a regular corner at the hearth, a
regular status in every family-convocation. And then
came a little black-and-tan English terrier for the
girls; and then a fleecy poodle, who established himself
on the corner of my wife's sofa; and for each of
these some little voices pleaded, and some little heart
would be so near broken at any slight, that my wife
and I resigned ourselves to live in menagerie, the more
so as we were obliged to confess a lurking weakness
towards these four-footed children ourselves.

So we grew and flourished together, — children,
dogs, birds, flowers, and all; and although my wife
often, in paroxysms of housewifeliness to which the
best of women are subject, would declare that we
never were fit to be seen, yet I comforted her with
the reflection that there were few people whose
friends seemed to consider them better worth seeing,
judging by the stream of visitors and loungers which
was always setting towards our parlor. People
seemed to find it good to be there; they said it

was somehow home-like and pleasant, and that there
was a kind of charm about it that made it easy to
talk and easy to live; and as my girls and boys grew
up, there seemed always to be some merry doing or
other going on there. Arty and Tom brought home
their college friends, who straightway took root there
and seemed to fancy themselves a part of us. We
had no reception-rooms apart, where the girls were
to receive young gentlemen; all the courting and
flirting that were to be done had for their arena the
ample variety of surface presented by our parlor,
which, with sofas and screens and lounges and recesses
and writing- and work-tables, disposed here
and there, and the genuine laisser aller of the whole
menage, seemed, on the whole, to have offered ample
advantages enough; for, at the time I write of, two
daughters were already established in marriage, while
my youngest was busy, as yet, in performing that
little domestic ballet of the cat with the mouse, in
the case of a most submissive youth of the neighborhood.

All this time our parlor-furniture, though of that
granitic formation I have indicated, began to show
marks of that decay to which things sublunary are
liable. I cannot say that I dislike this look in a
room. Take a fine, ample, hospitable apartment,
where all things, freely and generously used, softly

and indefinably grow old together, there is a sort of
mellow tone and keeping which pleases my eye.
What if the seams of the great inviting arm-chair,
where so many friends have sat and lounged, do grow
white? What, in fact, if some easy couch has an undeniable
hole worn in its friendly cover? I regard
with tenderness even these mortal weaknesses of
these servants and witnesses of our good times and
social fellowship. No vulgar touch wore them; they
may be called, rather, the marks and indentations
which the glittering in and out of the tide of social
happiness has worn in the rocks of our strand. I
would no more disturb the gradual toning-down and
aging of a well-used set of furniture by smart improvements
than I would have a modern dauber paint in
emendations in a fine old picture.

So we men reason; but women do not always
think as we do. There is a virulent demon of housekeeping,
not wholly cast out in the best of them, and
which often breaks out in unguarded moments. In
fact, Miss Marianne, being on the lookout for furniture
wherewith to begin a new establishment, and
Jenny, who had accompanied her in her peregrinations,
had more than once thrown out little disparaging
remarks on the time-worn appearance of our
establishment, suggesting comparison with those of
more modern-furnished rooms.

“It is positively scandalous, the way our furniture
looks,” I one day heard one of them declaring to her
mother; “and this old rag of a carpet!”

My feelings were hurt, not the less so that I knew
that the large cloth which covered the middle of the
floor, and which the women call a bocking, had been
bought and nailed down there, after a solemn family-counsel,
as the best means of concealing the too evident
darns which years of good cheer had made needful
in our stanch old household friend, the three-ply
carpet, made in those days when to be a three-ply was
a pledge of continuance and service.

Well, it was a joyous and bustling day, when, after
one of those domestic whirlwinds which the women
are fond of denominating house-cleaning, the new
Brussels carpet was at length brought in and nailed
down, and its beauty praised from mouth to mouth.
Our old friends called in and admired, and all seemed
to be well, except that I had that light and delicate
presage of changes to come which indefinitely brooded
over me.

The first premonitory symptom was the look of
apprehensive suspicion with which the female senate
regarded the genial sunbeams that had always glorified
our bow-window.

“This house ought to have inside blinds,” said
Marianne, with all the confident decision of youth;

“this carpet will be ruined, if the sun is allowed to
come in like that.”

“And that dirty little canary must really be hung
in the kitchen,” said Jenny; “he always did make
such a litter, scattering his seed-chippings about; and
he never takes his bath without flirting out some
water. And, mamma, it appears to me it will never
do to have the plants here. Plants are always either
leaking through the pots upon the carpet, or scattering
bits of blossoms and dead leaves, or some accident
upsets or breaks a pot. It was no matter, you
know, when we had the old carpet; but this we really
want to have kept nice.”

Mamma stood her ground for the plants, — darlings
of her heart for many a year, — but temporized,
and showed that disposition towards compromise
which is most inviting to aggression.

I confess I trembled; for, of all radicals on earth,
none are to be compared to females that have once
in hand a course of domestic innovation and reform.
The sacred fire, the divine furor, burns in their bosoms,
they become perfect Pythonesses, and every
chair they sit on assumes the magic properties of the
tripod. Hence the dismay that lodges in the bosoms
of us males at the fateful spring and autumn seasons,
denominated house-cleaning. Who can say whither
the awful gods, the prophetic fates, may drive our

fair household divinities; what sins of ours may be
brought to light; what indulgences and compliances,
which uninspired woman has granted in her ordinary
mortal hours, may be torn from us? He who has
been allowed to keep a pair of pet slippers in a concealed
corner, and by the fireside indulged with a
chair which he might, ad libitum, fill with all sorts of
pamphlets and miscellaneous literature, suddenly finds
himself reformed out of knowledge, his pamphlets
tucked away into pigeon-holes and corners, and his
slippers put in their place in the hall, with, perhaps, a
brisk insinuation about the shocking dust and disorder
that men will tolerate.

The fact was, that the very first night after the
advent of the new carpet I had a prophetic dream.
Among our treasures of art was a little etching, by an
English artist-friend, the subject of which was the
gambols of the household fairies in a baronial library
after the household were in bed. The little people
are represented in every attitude of frolic enjoyment.
Some escalade the great arm-chair, and look down
from its top as from a domestic Mont Blanc; some
climb about the bellows; some scale the shaft of the
shovel; while some, forming in magic ring, dance
festively on the yet glowing hearth. Tiny troops
promenade the writing-table. One perches himself
quaintly on the top of the inkstand, and holds colloquy

with another who sits cross-legged on a paper-weight,
while a companion looks down on them from
the top of the sand-box. It was an ingenious little
device, and gave me the idea, which I often expressed
to my wife, that much of the peculiar feeling of security,
composure, and enjoyment which seems to be
the atmosphere of some rooms and houses came from
the unsuspected presence of these little people, the
household fairies, so that the belief in their existence
became a solemn article of faith with me.

Accordingly, that evening, after the installation of
the carpet, when my wife and daughters had gone to
bed, as I sat with my slippered feet before the last
coals of the fire, I fell asleep in my chair, and, lo!
my own parlor presented to my eye a scene of busy
life. The little people in green were tripping to
and fro, but in great confusion. Evidently something
was wrong among them; for they were fussing and
chattering with each other, as if preparatory to a general
movement. In the region of the bow-window I
observed a tribe of them standing with tiny valises
and carpet-bags in their hands, as though about to
depart on a journey. On my writing-table another set
stood around my inkstand and pen-rack, who, pointing
to those on the floor, seemed to debate some
question among themselves; while others of them
appeared to be collecting and packing away in tiny

trunks certain fairy treasures, preparatory to a general
departure. When I looked at the social hearth, at my
wife's sofa and work-basket, I saw similar appearances
of dissatisfaction and confusion. It was evident
that the household fairies were discussing the
question of a general and simultaneous removal. I
groaned in spirit, and, stretching out my hand, began
a conciliatory address, when whisk went the whole
scene from before my eyes, and I awaked to behold
the form of my wife asking me if I were ill or had
had the nightmare that I groaned so. I told her
my dream, and we laughed at it together.

“We must give way to the girls a little,” she said.
“It is natural, you know, that they should wish us to
appear a little as other people do. The fact is, our
parlor is somewhat dilapidated; think how many years
we have lived in it without an article of new furniture.”

“I hate new furniture,” I remarked, in the bitterness
of my soul. “I hate anything new.”

My wife answered me discreetly, according to approved
principles of diplomacy. I was right. She
sympathized with me. At the same time, it was not
necessary, she remarked, that we should keep a hole
in our sofa-cover and arm-chair; there would certainly
be no harm in sending them to the upholsterer's to
be new-covered; she did n't much mind, for her part,

moving her plants to the south back-room, and the
bird would do well enough in the kitchen: I had
often complained of him for singing vociferously when
I was reading aloud.

So our sofa went to the upholsterer's; but the upholsterer
was struck with such horror at its clumsy,
antiquated, unfashionable appearance, that he felt
bound to make representations to my wife and daughters:
positively, it would be better for them to get a
new one, of a tempting pattern, which he showed them,
than to try to do anything with that. With a stitch or
so here and there it might do for a basement dining-room;
but, for a parlor, he gave it as his disinterested
opinion, — he must say, if the case were his own, he
should get, etc., etc. In short, we had a new sofa and
new chairs, and the plants and the birds were banished,
and some dark green blinds were put up to
exclude the sun from the parlor, and the blessed luminary
was allowed there only at rare intervals, when my
wife and daughters were out shopping, and I acted
out my uncivilized male instincts by pulling up every
shade and vivifying the apartment as in days of old.

But this was not the worst of it. The new furniture
and new carpet formed an opposition party in the
room. I believe in my heart that for every little
household fairy that went out with the dear old things
there came in a tribe of discontented brownies with

the new ones. These little wretches were always
twitching at the gowns of my wife and daughters, jogging
their elbows, and suggesting odious comparisons
between the smart new articles and what remained of
the old ones. They disparaged my writing-table in
the corner; they disparaged the old-fashioned lounge
in the other corner, which had been the maternal
throne for years; they disparaged the work-table, the
work-basket, with constant suggestions of how such
things as these would look in certain well-kept parlors
where new-fashioned furniture of the same sort as
ours existed.

“We don't have any parlor,” said Jenny, one day.
“Our parlor has always been a sort of log-cabin, —
library, study, nursery, greenhouse, all combined. We
never have had things like other people.”

“Yes, and this open fire makes such a dust; and
this carpet is one that shows every speck of dust; it
keeps one always on the watch.”

“I wonder why papa never had a study to himself;
I 'm sure I should think he would like it better than
sitting here among us all. Now there 's the great
south-room off the dining-room; if he would only
move his things there, and have his open fire, we
could then close up the fireplace, and put lounges in
the recesses, and mamma could have her things in the
nursery, — and then we should have a parlor fit to be
seen.”

I overheard all this, though I pretended not to, —
the little busy chits supposing me entirely buried in
the recesses of a German book over which I was
poring.

There are certain crises in a man's life when the
female element in his household asserts itself in dominant
forms that seem to threaten to overwhelm him.
The fair creatures, who in most matters have depended
on his judgment, evidently look upon him at these
seasons as only a forlorn, incapable male creature, to
be cajoled and flattered and persuaded out of his
native blindness and absurdity into the fairy-land of
their wishes.

“Of course, mamma,” said the busy voices, “men
can't understand such things. What can men know of
housekeeping, and how things ought to look? Papa
never goes into company; he don't know and don't
care how the world is doing, and don't see that nobody
now is living as we do.”

“Aha, my little mistresses, are you there?” I
thought; and I mentally resolved on opposing a
great force of what our politicians call backbone to
this pretty domestic conspiracy.

“When you get my writing-table out of this corner,
my pretty dears, I 'd thank you to let me know it.”

Thus spake I in my blindness, fool that I was.
Jupiter might as soon keep awake, when Juno came

in best bib and tucker, and with the cestus of Venus,
to get him to sleep. Poor Slender might as well hope
to get the better of pretty Mistress Anne Page, as one
of us clumsy-footed men might endeavor to escape
from the tangled labyrinth of female wiles.

In short, in less than a year it was all done, without
any quarrel, any noise, any violence, — done, I scarce
knew when or how, but with the utmost deference to
my wishes, the most amiable hopes that I would not
put myself out, the most sincere protestations that, if
I liked it better as it was, my goddesses would give
up and acquiesce. In fact, I seemed to do it of myself,
constrained thereto by what the Emperor Napoleon
has so happily called the logic of events, — that
old, well-known logic by which the man who has once
said A must say B, and he who has said B must say
the whole alphabet. In a year, we had a parlor with
two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa,
and six chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always
shut up, and a hole in the floor which kept the parlor
warm, and great, heavy curtains that kept out all the
light that was not already excluded by the green
shades.

It was as proper and orderly a parlor as those of
our most fashionable neighbors; and when our friends
called, we took them stumbling into its darkened solitude,
and opened a faint crack in one of the window-shades,

and came down in our best clothes, and talked
with them there. Our old friends rebelled at this,
and asked what they had done to be treated so, and
complained so bitterly that gradually we let them into
the secret that there was a great south-room which I
had taken for my study, where we all sat, where the
old carpet was down, where the sun shone in at the
great window, where my wife's plants flourished and
the canary-bird sang, and my wife had her sofa in the
corner, and the old brass andirons glistened and the
wood-fire crackled, — in short, a room to which all the
household fairies had emigrated.

When they once had found that out, it was difficult
to get any of them to sit in our parlor. I had purposely
christened the new room my study, that I might
stand on my rights as master of ceremonies there,
though I opened wide arms of welcome to any who
chose to come. So, then, it would often come to pass,
that, when we were sitting round the fire in my study
of an evening, the girls would say, —

“Come, what do we always stay here for? Why
don't we ever sit in the parlor?”

And then there would be manifested among guests
and family-friends a general unwillingness to move.

“O, hang it, girls!” would Arthur say; “the parlor
is well enough, all right; let it stay as it is, and let
a fellow stay where he can do as he pleases and feels

at home”; and to this view of the matter would
respond divers of the nice young bachelors who were
Arthur's and Tom's sworn friends.

In fact, nobody wanted to stay in our parlor now.
It was a cold, correct, accomplished fact; the household
fairies had left it, — and when the fairies leave a
room, nobody ever feels at home in it. No pictures,
curtains, no wealth of mirrors, no elegance of lounges,
can in the least make up for their absence. They are
a capricious little set; there are rooms where they will
not stay, and rooms where they will; but no one can
ever have a good time without them.