THE CARPET AT THE DOOR.
SOME women much prefer to use a bit of rag-carpet in place of a regular-made
mat at their doors. It is a good idea. If there is any thing better calculated
to attract a man's attention than a rag-carpet at a door, we don't know of
it. It causes more hard feeling, and is productive of more hard and unforgiving
words, than any article about the house, excepting always the family hammer.
Three pieces of rag-carpet thus situated will bankrupt an upright man inside
of a fortnight, and turn a happy home into an uproarious and outrageous Bedlam.
Not one man in one hundred can go through a door thus protected without catching
his foot in that carpet, to the great danger of flinging himself violently
to the floor, and flattening his nose. And it not only twists his legs, but
it drags over the sill, and catches the door as he shuts it, and starts his
temper afresh. It being too degrading and unmanly to stoop down and remove
the obstacle with his hand, he gives it a kick, and is surprised to see how
easy it is to miss it. He fetches another and more vicious kick at it, and
succeeds in removing about an inch of it. Then
he swings the door to, and,
setting his teeth together, attempts to shut it over the obstacle. The more
the obstruction resists him, the more desperately he pushes. This is on the
generally-received and very agreeable theory, that inanimate things are human
in so far as it is human to be vicious and obstinate. It is the principle
which induces a boy to pound a stick of wood which flies up and hits him.
Having convinced himself that the building will not sufficiently give to
permit of shutting the door without removing the carpet, the carpet is kicked
away (it is never
laid away); and it is either kicked the whole length
of the hall, or tumbled in a heap just outside the sill, where the next person
appearing catches both feet into it, and shoots into the room with hair erect,
eyeballs protruding, and feet madly and passionately endeavoring to recover
their balance.
