University of Virginia Library

2. II.
HOME-KEEPING vs. HOUSE-KEEPING.

I AM a frank, open-hearted man, as, perhaps, you
have by this time perceived, and you will not,
therefore, be surprised to know that I read my last
article on the carpet to my wife and the girls before
I sent it to the “Atlantic,” and we had a hearty laugh
over it together. My wife and the girls, in fact, felt
that they could afford to laugh, for they had carried
their point, their reproach among women was taken
away, they had become like other folks. Like other
folks they had a parlor, an undeniable best parlor,
shut up and darkened, with all proper carpets, curtains,
lounges, and marble-topped tables, too good for
human nature's daily food; and being sustained by
this consciousness, they cheerfully went on receiving
their friends in the study, and having good times in
the old free-and-easy way; for did not everybody
know that this room was not their best? and if the
furniture was old-fashioned and a little the worse for
antiquity, was it not certain that they had better, which
they could use, if they would?

“And supposing we wanted to give a party,” said
Jenny, “how nicely our parlor would light up! Not
that we ever do give parties, but if we should, — and
for a wedding-reception, you know.”

I felt the force of the necessity; it was evident
that the four or five hundred extra which we had
expended was no more than such solemn possibilities
required.

“Now, papa thinks we have been foolish,” said
Marianne, “and he has his own way of making a
good story of it; but, after all, I desire to know if
people are never to get a new carpet. Must we keep
the old one till it actually wears to tatters?”

This is a specimen of the reductio ad absurdum
which our fair antagonists of the other sex are fond
of employing. They strip what we say of all delicate
shadings and illusory phrases, and reduce it to some
bare question of fact, with which they make a home-thrust
at us.

“Yes, that 's it; are people never to get a new carpet?”
echoed Jenny.

“My dears,” I replied, “it is a fact that to introduce
anything new into an apartment hallowed by many
home-associations, where all things have grown old
together, requires as much care and adroitness as
for an architect to restore an arch or niche in a fine
old ruin. The fault of our carpet was that it was in

another style from everything in our room, and made
everything in it look dilapidated. Its colors, material,
and air belonged to another manner of life, and were
a constant plea for alterations; and you see it actually
drove out and expelled the whole furniture of the
room, and I am not sure yet that it may not entail on
us the necessity of refurnishing the whole house.”

“My dear!” said my wife, in a tone of remonstrance;
but Jane and Marianne laughed and colored.

“Confess, now,” said I, looking at them, “have
you not had secret designs on the hall- and stair-carpet?”

“Now, papa, how could you know it? I only said
to Marianne that to have Brussels in the parlor and
that old mean-looking ingrain carpet in the hall did
not seem exactly the thing; and, in fact, you know,
mamma, Messrs. Ketchem & Co. showed us such a
lovely pattern, designed to harmonize with our parlor-carpet.”

“I know it, girls,” said my wife; “but you know
I said at once that such an expense was not to be
thought of.”

“Now, girls,” said I, “let me tell you a story I
heard once of a very sensible old New England minister,
who lived, as our country ministers generally do,
rather near to the bone, but still quite contentedly. It

was in the days when knee-breeches and long stockings
were worn, and this good man was offered a
present of a very nice pair of black silk hose. He
declined, saying, he `could not afford to wear them.'

“`Not afford it?' said the friend; `why, I give
them to you.'

“`Exactly; but it will cost me not less than two
hundred dollars to take them, and I cannot do it.'

“`How is that?'

“`Why, in the first place, I shall no sooner put
them on than my wife will say, “My dear, you must
have a new pair of knee-breeches,” and I shall get
them. Then my wife will say, “My dear, how
shabby your coat is! You must have a new one,”
and I shall get a new coat. Then she will say,
“Now, my dear, that hat will never do,” and then
I shall have a new hat; and then I shall say, “My
dear, it will never do for me to be so fine and you to
wear your old gown,” and so my wife will get a new
gown; and then the new gown will require a new
shawl and a new bonnet; all of which we shall not
feel the need of, if I don't take this pair of silk stockings,
for, as long as we don't see them, our old things
seem very well suited to each other.'”

The girls laughed at this story, and I then added,
in my most determined manner, —

“But I must warn you, girls, that I have compromised

to the utmost extent of my power, and that I
intend to plant myself on the old stair-carpet in determined
resistance. I have no mind to be forbidden
the use of the front-stairs, or condemned to get up
into my bedroom by a private ladder, as I should be
immediately, if there were a new carpet down.”

“Why, papa!”

“Would it not be so? Can the sun shine in the
parlor now for fear of fading the carpet? Can we
keep a fire there for fear of making dust, or use the
lounges and sofas for fear of wearing them out? If
you got a new entry- and stair-carpet, as I said, I
should have to be at the expense of another staircase
to get up to our bedroom.”

“O no, papa,” said Jane, innocently; “there are
very pretty druggets, now, for covering stair-carpets,
so that they can be used without hurting them.”

“Put one over the old carpet, then,” said I, “and
our acquaintance will never know but it is a new
one.”

All the female senate laughed at this proposal, and
said it sounded just like a man.

“Well,” said I, standing up resolutely for my sex,
“a man's ideas on woman's matters may be worth
some attention. I flatter myself that an intelligent,
educated man does n't think upon and observe with
interest any particular subject for years of his life

without gaining some ideas respecting it that are good
for something; at all events, I have written another
article for the `Atlantic,' which I will read to you.”

“Well, wait one minute, papa, till we get our work,”
said the girls, who, to say the truth, always exhibit a
flattering interest in anything their papa writes, and
who have the good taste never to interrupt his readings
with any conversations in an undertone on cross-stitch
and floss-silks, as the manner of some is. Hence
the little feminine bustle of arranging all these matters
beforehand. Jane, or Jenny, as I call her in my
good-natured moods, put on a fresh clear stick of
hickory, of that species denominated shagbark, which
is full of most charming slivers, burning with such a
clear flame, and emitting such a delicious perfume
in burning, that I would not change it with the millionnaire
who kept up his fire with cinnamon.

You must know, my dear Mr. Atlantic, and you,
my confidential friends of the reading public, that
there is a certain magic or spiritualism which I have
the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue
of which my wife and daughters never hear or
see the little personalities respecting them which form
parts of my papers. By a peculiar arrangement which
I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the
familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls
on their eyes and ears when I am reading, or when

they read the parts personal to themselves; otherwise
their sense of feminine propriety would be shocked at
the free way in which they and their most internal
affairs are confidentially spoken of between me and
you, O loving readers.

Thus, in an undertone, I tell you that my little
Jenny, as she is zealously and systematically arranging
the fire, and trimly whisking every untidy particle
of ashes from the hearth, shows in every movement
of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the
knowing, observing glance of her eye, and in all her
energetic movements, that her small person is endued
and made up of the very expressed essence of housewifeliness,
— she is the very attar, not of roses, but of
housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness
are a nature to her; she is as dainty and delicate
in her person as a white cat, as everlastingly busy as a
bee; and all the most needful faculties of time, weight,
measure, and proportion ought to be fully developed
in her skull, if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides
all this, she has a sort of hard-grained little vein
of common sense, against which my fanciful conceptions
and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a
little sharp grating, if they are not well put. In fact,
this kind of woman needs carefully to be idealized in
the process of education, or she will stiffen and dry,
as she grows old, into a veritable household Pharisee,

a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in
artistic values and artistic weights and measures, to
study all the arts and sciences of the beautiful, and
then she is charming. Most useful, most needful,
these little women: they have the centripetal force
which keeps all the domestic planets from gyrating
and frisking in unseemly orbits, — and properly trained,
they fill a house with the beauty of order, the harmony
and consistency of proportion, the melody of things
moving in time and tune, without violating the graceful
appearance of ease which Art requires.

So I had an eye to Jenny's education in my article
which I unfolded and read, and which was entitled,

Home-keeping vs. House-keeping.

There are many women who know how to keep a
house, but there are but few that know how to keep
a home. To keep a house may seem a complicated
affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it lies in
the region of the material, in the region of weight,
measure, color, and the positive forces of life. To
keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all these,
but it takes in the intellectual, the social, the spiritual,
the immortal.

Here the hickory-stick broke in two, and the two

brands fell controversially out and apart on the hearth,
scattering the ashes and coals, and calling for Jenny
and the hearth-brush. Your wood-fire has this foible,
that it needs something to be done to it every five
minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of
our bright-faced genius are like the piquant sallies of
a clever friend, — they do not strike us as unreasonable.

When Jenny had laid down her brush, she said, —

“Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar
into metaphysics.”

“Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract
terms,” said I, with a look calculated to reduce
her to a respectful condition. “Everything has a
subjective and an objective mode of presentation.”

“There papa goes with subjective and objective!”
said Marianne. “For my part, I never can remember
which is which.”

“I remember,” said Jenny; “it 's what our old
nurse used to call internal and out-ternal, — I always
remember by that.”

“Come, my dears,” said my wife, “let your father
read”; so I went on as follows: —

I remember in my bachelor days going with my
boon companion, Bill Carberry, to look at the house
to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride.

Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow,
the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural
aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would.
How could we tell under what strange aspects he
might look forth upon us, when once he had passed
into “that undiscovered country” of matrimony? But
Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.

“I 'll tell you what, Chris,” he said, as he sprang
cheerily up the steps and unlocked the door of his
future dwelling, “do you know what I chose this
house for? Because it 's a social-looking house. Look
there, now,” he said, as he ushered me into a pair of
parlors, — “look at those long south windows, the
sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a capital
corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris,
with our books or our paper, spread out loose and
easy, and Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam.
I 'm getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever
see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital
suppers and things we 'll have there! the nicest times,
— everything free and easy, you know, — just what
I 've always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris,
you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like
mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head
of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go.
And here now 's the library, — fancy this full of books
and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you

shall come just as you please and ask no questions, —
all the same as if it were your own, you know.”

“And Sophie, what will she say to all this?”

“Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both
of you, and a capital girl to keep things going. O,
Sophie 'll make a house of this, you may depend!”

A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over
boxes and through straw and wrappings to show me
the glories of the parlor-furniture, — with which he
seemed pleased as a child with a new toy.

“Look here,” he said; “see these chairs, garnet-colored
satin, with a pattern on each; well, the sofa 's
just like them, and the curtains to match, and the
carpets made for the floor with centre-pieces and
borders. I never saw anything more magnificent in
my life. Sophie's governor furnishes the house, and
everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you see.
Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make
the rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting
us in order.”

“Why, Bill,” said I, “you are going to be lodged
like a prince. I hope you 'll be able to keep it up;
but law-business comes in rather slowly at first, old
fellow.”

“Well, you know it is n't the way I should furnish,
if my capital was the one to cash the bills; but then,
you see, Sophie's people do it, and let them, — a girl

does n't want to come down out of the style she has
always lived in.”

I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment
that social freedom would expire in that house, crushed
under a weight of upholstery.

But there came in due time the wedding and the
wedding-reception, and we all went to see Bill in his
new house splendidly lighted up and complete from
top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he
was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our
visiting was concerned. The running in, and dropping
in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal
calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as
likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.

Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping,
sparkling, busy sort of girls, began at once to
develop her womanhood, and show her principles, and
was as different from her former self as your careworn,
mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten.
Not but that Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital
heart, a good, true womanly one, and was loving
and obliging; but still she was one of the desperately
painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very
blood, as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety,
and she came of a race of women in whom house-keeping
was more than an art or a science, — it was,
so to speak, a religion. Sophie's mother, aunts, and

grandmothers, for nameless generations back, were
known and celebrated housekeepers. They might
have been genuine descendants of the inhabitants of
that Hollandic town of Broeck, celebrated by Washington
Irving, where the cows' tails are kept tied up
with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the firewood
are painted white. He relates how a celebrated
preacher, visiting this town, found it impossible to
draw these housewives from their earthly views and
employments, until he took to preaching on the neatness
of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its
walls and the polish of its golden pavement, when the
faces of all the housewives were set Zionward at once.

Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping
is onerous enough when a poor girl first enters on the
care of a moderately furnished house, where the articles
are not too expensive to be reasonably renewed
as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse
when a cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon
her care, — when splendid crystals cut into her conscience,
and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and
rust stand ever ready to devour and sully in every
room and passage-way.

Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all
the mothers and aunts, — she was warned of moths,
warned of cockroaches, warned of flies, warned of
dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers,

made of cold Holland linen, in which they looked
like bodies laid out, — even the curtain-tassels had
each its little shroud, — and bundles of receipts and
of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation
and purification and care of all these articles were
stuffed into the poor girl's head, before guiltless of
cares as the feathers that floated above it.

Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture
were to be kept at such an ideal point of perfection
that he needed another house to live in, — for,
poor fellow, he found the difference between having a
house and a home. It was only a year or two after
that my wife and I started our menage on very different
principles, and Bill would often drop in upon us,
wistfully lingering in the cosey arm-chair between my
writing-table and my wife's sofa, and saying with a sigh
how confoundedly pleasant things looked there, —
so pleasant to have a bright, open fire, and geraniums
and roses and birds, and all that sort of thing, and to
dare to stretch out one's legs and move without thinking
what one was going to hit. “Sophie is a good
girl!” he would say, “and wants to have everything
right, but you see they won't let her. They 've loaded
her with so many things that have to be kept in lavender,
that the poor girl is actually getting thin and
losing her health; and then, you see, there 's Aunt
Zeruah, she mounts guard at our house, and keeps up

such strict police-regulations that a fellow can't do a
thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome
and dismal! — not a ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray
of light, except when a visitor is calling, and then
they open a crack. They're afraid of flies, and yet,
dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and picture-frame
muffled to its throat from March to December.
I 'd like for curiosity to see what a fly would
do in our parlors!”

“Well,” said I, “can't you have some little family
sitting-room, where you can make yourselves cosey?”

“Not a bit of it. Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have
fixed their throne up in our bedroom, and there they
sit all day long, except at calling-hours, and then
Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah
insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house
in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom,
and then, she says, nothing gets out of place;
and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus
stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always
kept everything in their houses so that they could go
and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I 'll
bet they could in our house. From end to end it is
kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to
Europe, — not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or
any trace of a human being, in sight. The piano shut
tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings

locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why,
if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first
place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade
windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour
before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah
is standing tiptoe at the door, ready to whip
everything back and lock up again. A fellow can't
be social, or take any comfort in showing his books
and pictures that way. Then there 's our great, light
dining-room, with its sunny south windows, — Aunt
Zeruah got us out of that early in April, because she
said the flies would speck the frescos and get into
the china-closet, and we have been eating in a little
dingy den, with a window looking out on a back-alley,
ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the dining-room
is always in perfect order, and that it is such a
care off Sophie's mind that I ought to be willing to
eat down-cellar to the end of the chapter. Now, you
see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because
Sophie's folks all agree, that, if there is anything in
creation that is ignorant and dreadful and must n't be
allowed his way anywhere, it 's `a man.' Why, you 'd
think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like
bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend,
if we are not kept down-cellar and chained; and she
worries Sophie, and Sophie's mother comes in and
worries, and if I try to get anything done differently,
Sophie cries, and says she don't know what to do, and
so I give it up. Now, if I want to ask a few of our
set in sociably to dinner, I can't have them where we
eat down-cellar, — O, that would never do! Aunt
Zeruah and Sophie's mother and the whole family
would think the family honor was forever ruined and
undone. We must n't ask them, unless we open the
dining-room, and have out all the best china, and get
the silver home from the bank; and if we do that,
Aunt Zeruah does n't sleep for a week beforehand,
getting ready for it, and for a week after, getting
things put away; and then she tells me, that, in Sophie's
delicate state, it really is abominable for me to
increase her cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with
me at Delmonico's, and then Sophie cries, and Sophie's
mother says it does n't look respectable for a
family-man to be dining at public places; but, hang it,
a fellow wants a home somewhere!”

My wife soothed the chafed spirit, and spake comfortably
unto him, and told him that he knew there
was the old lounging-chair always ready for him at
our fireside. “And you know,” she said, “our things
are all so plain that we are never tempted to mount
any guard over them; our carpets are nothing, and
therefore we let the sun fade them, and live on the
sunshine and the flowers.”

“That 's it,” said Bill, bitterly. “Carpets fading!

— that 's Aunt Zeruah's monomania. These women
think that the great object of houses is to keep out
sunshine. What a fool I was, when I gloated over
the prospect of our sunny south windows! Why,
man, there are three distinct sets of fortifications
against the sunshine in those windows: first, outside
blinds; then, solid, folding, inside shutters; and, lastly,
heavy, thick, lined damask curtains, which loop
quite down to the floor. What 's the use of my pictures,
I desire to know? They are hung in that room,
and it 's a regular campaign to get light enough to see
what they are.”

“But, at all events, you can light them up with gas
in the evening.”

“In the evening! Why, do you know my wife
never wants to sit there in the evening? She says
she has so much sewing to do that she and Aunt
Zeruah must sit up in the bedroom, because it would
n't do to bring work into the parlor. Did n't you
know that? Don't you know there must n't be such
a thing as a bit of real work ever seen in a parlor?
What if some threads should drop on the carpet?
Aunt Zeruah would have to open all the fortifications
next day, and search Jerusalem with candles to find
them. No; in the evening the gas is lighted at half-cock,
you know; and if I turn it up, and bring in my
newspapers and spread about me, and pull down some

books to read, I can feel the nervousness through the
chamber-floor. Aunt Zeruah looks in at eight, and at
a quarter past, and at half-past, and at nine, and at
ten, to see if I am done, so that she may fold up the
papers and put a book on them, and lock up the
books in their cases. Nobody ever comes in to spend
an evening. They used to try it when we were first
married, but I believe the uninhabited appearance of
our parlors discouraged them. Everybody has stopped
coming now, and Aunt Zeruah says `it is such a comfort,
for now the rooms are always in order. How
poor Mrs. Crowfield lives, with her house such a
thoroughfare, she is sure she can't see. Sophie never
would have strength for it; but then, to be sure, some
folks a'n't as particular as others. Sophie was brought
up in a family of very particular housekeepers.'”

My wife smiled, with that calm, easy, amused smile
that has brightened up her sofa for so many years.

Bill added, bitterly, —

“Of course, I could n't say that I wished the whole
set and system of housekeeping women at the —
what-'s-his-name? because Sophie would have cried
for a week, and been utterly forlorn and disconsolate.
I know it 's not the poor girl's fault; I try sometimes
to reason with her, but you can't reason with the whole
of your wife's family, to the third and fourth generation
backwards; but I 'm sure it 's hurting her health,

— wearing her out. Why, you know Sophie used to
be the life of our set; and now she really seems
eaten up with care from morning to night, there are
so many things in the house that something dreadful
is happening to all the while, and the servants we get
are so clumsy. Why, when I sit with Sophie and
Aunt Zeruah, it 's nothing but a constant string of
complaints about the girls in the kitchen. We keep
changing our servants all the time, and they break
and destroy so that now we are turned out of the
use of all our things. We not only eat in the basement,
but all our pretty table-things are put away,
and we have all the cracked plates and cracked
tumblers and cracked teacups and old buck-handled
knives that can be raised out of chaos. I could use
these things and be merry, if I did n't know we had
better ones; and I can't help wondering whether there
is n't some way that our table could be set to look
like a gentleman's table; but Aunt Zeruah says that
`it would cost thousands, and what difference does it
make as long as nobody sees it but us?' You see,
there is no medium in her mind between china and
crystal and cracked earthen-ware. Well, I 'm wondering
how all these laws of the Medes and Persians
are going to work when the children come along.
I 'm in hopes the children will soften off the old
folks, and make the house more habitable.”

Well, children did come, a good many of them, in
time. There was Tom, a broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked,
active, hilarious son of mischief, born in the
very image of his father; and there was Charlie, and
Jim, and Louisa, and Sophie the second, and Frank,
— and a better, brighter, more joy-giving household,
as far as temperament and nature were concerned,
never existed.

But their whole childhood was a long battle, children
versus furniture, and furniture always carried the
day. The first step of the housekeeping powers was
to choose the least agreeable and least available room
in the house for the children's nursery, and to fit it up
with all the old, cracked, rickety furniture a neighboring
auction-shop could afford, and then to keep
them in it. Now everybody knows that to bring up
children to be upright, true, generous, and religious,
needs so much discipline, so much restraint and correction,
and so many rules and regulations, that it is
all that the parents can carry out, and all the children
can bear. There is only a certain amount of the vital
force for parents or children to use in this business of
education, and one must choose what it shall be used
for. The Aunt-Zeruah faction chose to use it for
keeping the house and furniture, and the children's
education proceeded accordingly. The rules of right
and wrong of which they heard most frequently were

all of this sort: Naughty children were those who
went up the front-stairs, or sat on the best sofa, or
fingered any of the books in the library, or got out
one of the best teacups, or drank out of the cut-glass
goblets.

Why did they ever want to do it? If there ever
is a forbidden fruit in an Eden, will not our young
Adams and Eves risk soul and body to find out how
it tastes? Little Tom, the oldest boy, had the courage
and enterprise and perseverance of a Captain
Parry or Dr. Kane, and he used them all in voyages
of discovery to forbidden grounds. He stole
Aunt Zeruah's keys, unlocked her cupboards and
closets, saw, handled, and tasted everything for himself,
and gloried in his sins.

“Don't you know, Tom,” said the nurse to him
once, “if you are so noisy and rude, you 'll disturb
your dear mamma? She 's sick, and she may die, if
you 're not careful.”

“Will she die?” says Tom, gravely.

“Why, she may.”

“Then,” said Tom, turning on his heel, — “then
I 'll go up the front-stairs.”

As soon as ever the little rebel was old enough, he
was sent away to boarding-school, and then there was
never found a time when it was convenient to have
him come home again. He could not come in the

spring, for then they were house-cleaning, nor in the
autumn, because then they were house-cleaning; and
so he spent his vacations at school, unless, by good
luck, a companion who was so fortunate as to have
a home invited him there. His associations, associates,
habits, principles, were as little known to his
mother as if she had sent him to China. Aunt Zeruah
used to congratulate herself on the rest there was at
home, now he was gone, and say she was only living
in hopes of the time when Charlie and Jim would be
big enough to send away too; and meanwhile Charlie
and Jim, turned out of the charmed circle which should
hold growing boys to the father's and mother's side,
detesting the dingy, lonely play-room, used to run the
city streets, and hang round the railroad depots or
docks. Parents may depend upon it, that, if they
do not make an attractive resort for their boys, Satan
will. There are places enough, kept warm and light
and bright and merry, where boys can go whose
mothers' parlors are too fine for them to sit in. There
are enough to be found to clap them on the back, and
tell them stories that their mothers must not hear,
and laugh when they compass with their little piping
voices the dreadful litanies of sin and shame. In
middle life, our poor Sophie, who as a girl was so
gay and frolicsome, so full of spirits, had dried and
sharpened into a hard-visaged, angular woman, —
careful and troubled about many things, and forgetful
that one thing is needful. One of the boys had
run away to sea; I believe he has never been heard
of. As to Tom, the oldest, he ran a career wild and
hard enough for a time, first at school and then in
college, and there came a time when he came home,
in the full might of six feet two, and almost broke his
mother's heart with his assertions of his home rights
and privileges. Mothers who throw away the key of
their children's hearts and childhood sometimes have
a sad retribution. As the children never were considered
when they were little and helpless, so they
do not consider when they are strong and powerful.
Tom spread wide desolation among the household
gods, lounging on the sofas, spitting tobacco-juice on
the carpets, scattering books and engravings hither
and thither, and throwing all the family traditions
into wild disorder, as he would never have done, had
not all his childish remembrances of them been embittered
by the association of restraint and privation.
He actually seemed to hate any appearance of luxury
or taste or order, — he was a perfect Philistine.

As for my friend Bill, from being the pleasantest
and most genial of fellows, he became a morose,
misanthropic man. Dr. Franklin has a significant
proverb, — “Silks and satins put out the kitchen-fire.”
Silks and satins — meaning by them the luxuries

of housekeeping — often put out not only the
parlor-fire, but that more sacred flame, the fire of
domestic love. It is the greatest possible misery
to a man and to his children to be homeless; and
many a man has a splendid house, but no home.

“Papa,” said Jenny, “you ought to write and tell
what are your ideas of keeping a home.”

“Girls, you have only to think how your mother
has brought you up.”

Nevertheless, I think, being so fortunate a husband,
I might reduce my wife's system to an analysis,
and my next paper shall be, —

What is a Home, and how to keep it.