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 AMENITIES OP HOME 
 
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 " Of all the places in the world, home is the 
 place in which we should cultivate manners." 
 
 >,». »», », 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 
 1, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET. 
 
 1881. 
 

 COPTEIGHT BY 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
 1881. 
 
 « » t 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I.— Difficulties in the Way 
 II. — The Mothek begins 
 III. — A Subtile Sympathy . 
 IV. — Education and Manners of Girls 
 V. — Respect for the Rights of Others. 
 VI. — The Model Girl . 
 VII. — The Manners of Young Men 
 VIII. — Consideration for Each Other . 
 IX. — The Tyrant of Home. 
 X. — The First Engagement . 
 XI. — A Profession for our Sons . 
 XII. ^ — Professions for Women . 
 XIII. — The Influence of Aged People 
 XIV. — The Capabilities of Home Education 
 XV. — The Unhappy Home . 
 XVI. — The Musical Member 
 XVII. — The Cheerful Member 
 XVIIL— The Good Father 
 XIX. — The Good Wife 
 XX. — Making Home Attractive 
 
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Digitized by tine Internet Arcinive 
 
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 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 littp://www.archive.org/details/amenitiesofliomeOOsherricli 
 
AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY. 
 
 The first thing which should be taught a child is obe- 
 dience, and after that should come reverence. 
 
 It is very hard to teach an American child reverence. 
 His parents must be people of remarkable force of charac- 
 ter if they succeed in doing so, for the whole tendency of 
 our free institutions is against him. The Declaration of 
 Independence arrays itself with its *^ glittering generali- 
 ties " against this first effort of home training. 
 
 The newly arrived foreigner, in his might, majestic 
 through numbers, defeats the idea ; for he soon learns, as 
 the beginning of his political career, that his vote is as 
 good as his master's — perhaps better. Thus the good old 
 relation between master and servant, of respect on the one 
 hand and help on the other — the best relation for the bene- 
 fit of home — is uprooted at once. 
 
 Almost the first impression on a young child's mind is of 
 the insolence of his nurse to his mother. He sees that her 
 orders are not obeyed, that she is powerless to enforce them. 
 He hears the nurse speak to her in loud, arrogant, defiant 
 tones. He often sees his mother, before a powerful and 
 
6 /;, \ \.\4MpN¥flEkpf,fi^ 
 
 strong elderly nurse, paralyzed with fear ; for, if she deems 
 that her child's comfort and welfare are at stake, if she be- 
 lieves that the nurse knows more than she does, she will 
 endure insolence to herself and a sort of assumption on the 
 part of the nurse of an authority which should never be 
 delegated. 
 
 Every mother, if she has reached maturity, will re- 
 member this slavery of hers when she was young, and will 
 regret it. The matter seemed a trifling one at first. It be- 
 gan in a fear of her own inexperience and in a belief in 
 the nurse's knowledge. It went on in contests over the 
 baby's food, his sash, his Sunday coat, the mother always 
 being worsted in the fight. 
 
 She now regrets that weakness ; but with others will 
 not that weakness plead for her, a«, broken with ill-health, 
 confused by new duties, she tries to balance between the 
 imperfections of American servitude and no servitude at 
 all ? She begins then what is to be the work of her life, 
 not the decision between right and wrong, but the more 
 difficult decision between two duties. 
 
 If the nurse is neat and faithful to the child's best in- 
 terest, she will put up with her, even if her temper is bad 
 and her manners horrible ; if she changes the nurse, who 
 knows but she may hire a drunkard, a thief, or a creature 
 careless as to neatness and health ? Thus the mother rea- 
 sons, and the nursery becomes the school of insubordina- 
 tion. No child likes to obey. He may love his mother — 
 of course he does — better than anything, but when a con- 
 flict of opinion comes, he prefers his own will. A strong 
 and conscientious mother will compel her child to obey ; a 
 weak and conscientious mother will not be able to do so. 
 He sees that Sarah does not obey, why should he ? The 
 American child goes to school. There he is taught rou- 
 tine, but not reverence. He is not especially reverential to 
 his teachers ; nor is he taught that obedience to superior 
 
DIFFICULTIES m THE WAY. 7 
 
 rank or station which is a part of tlie education of a for- 
 eigner. . 
 
 Therefore he has no inherited nor early inculcated rever- 
 ence. He has good instincts, he has learned to tell the 
 truth, he is energetic and industrious, perhaps ; but a 
 French boy would be shocked at the manners of the young 
 American son to his mother, even had the boy all the other 
 virtues which he respects. Nothing in this imperfect 
 world is so beautiful as the relation of a French son to his 
 mother, lie sees her from his first sentient look the 
 being whom every one in the house adores. Does the nurse 
 or the maid speak even sharply to the mistress of the house, 
 she is immediately discharged. The child would thus see 
 his mothers authority verified from the first, and, whatever 
 we may say on this side of the water of the marriage rela- 
 tion in France, the master of the house certainly compels a 
 sort of respect from his servants and children toward the 
 mother and mistress of the house which goes far toward 
 making the manners of a nation respectful and polite. 
 
 From the cradle to the grave a French son has one 
 duty, one affection, Avhich is paramount to all others — that 
 is, his love for his mother. As a child, as a boy, he treats 
 her with perfect respect and obedience. As a young man, 
 he delights to send her flowers, to take her to the theatres 
 and cafes. It is a common sight in Paris to see a young 
 man With a gray-haired woman at the public galleries and 
 places of amusement, apparently perfectly happy with each 
 other, the young man studying to make his mother com- 
 fortable and amused. Often, in leaving France, a young 
 man asks of his family the privilege of taking his mother 
 with him as his ^'^ guide, philosopher, and friend." Before 
 his marriage is arranged, she is his constant companion and 
 his best adviser. Never until death separates them does he 
 fail in his duty toward her ; and, after that event has closed . 
 tliis sweet, dutiful history, he keeps the anniversary of 
 
8 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 her death as his most sacred day, and visits her grave with 
 his children to dress it with flowers. 
 
 An American young man of even the kindest heart and 
 manners seldom treats his mother with much outward at- 
 tention. He may, if necessary, work for her ; he would be 
 shocked if he heard that he had been guilty of any neglect 
 of even the most remote duty to her. But he gives her no 
 small attentions, such as sending her flowers, helping her 
 to her carriage, greeting her in the morning, taking her to 
 the theatre or for a drive. Nothing is so rare as to see a 
 young American gentleman in attendance upon his mother. 
 Even his manner of speaking to her is harsh and impolite. 
 He goes to her for money, if his father does not give it to 
 him, but he is very indifferent as to his manner of asking 
 for it ; he is full of reproaches if she does not give it to 
 him. 
 
 We are telling plain truths — but they are truths. If the 
 two differ in opinion as to the time to leave a party, it is 
 he who reproaches her. The boy is not so much to be 
 blamed as one would think, when we remember that he has 
 heard often her pwn servants and the tradespeople with 
 whom she deals speak to his mother impertinently. He 
 has never been taught reverence ; it is not in the air. He 
 has seen men polite to his mother, particularly if she is 
 young and pretty ; but he has seen no reverence such as 
 should always accompany her high position. His training 
 at his school has not been that of an English school, where 
 he is taught to fag for the older boys, be whipped by the 
 stronger boys, and to regard the principal as a sort of demi- 
 god. The whole training of a young American tends to 
 drive out from his nature every such feeling as obedience. 
 He is his own master, and he owes respect to no man. 
 
 To counteract this, and to be, from the first to the 
 last, the one element of correction in this tide which for 
 ever runs counter to her best efforts, is the mother's duty ; 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN TILE WAY. 9 
 
 she must be Church and State, throne, and hereditary 
 nobihty, to the boy. She must teach him to look up ; to 
 obey, to conquer himself, to be a well-mannered and a self- 
 respecting person, instead of being an ungovernable cub. 
 Obedience to the law, all Americans have the intelligence 
 to render. They know that therein lies their safety. "I 
 am the State," is each man's fieldmark and device. But 
 to be a man of manners, always respecting age, woman- 
 hood, the proper precedence of certain dignitaries, one's 
 j)arents and one's clergy — this has to be taught. 
 
 American men respect woman in the highest sense, and 
 treat them with all the chivalry possible, as far as immu- 
 nity from insult is concerned. The national character of the 
 American man in this respect is above reproach. But are 
 they at home amiable and polite ? Do they treat their 
 wives and daughters or their mothers with constant and 
 daily and proper politeness ? Are American women models 
 in this respect ? Do they remember to be grateful, polite, 
 in little matters of salutations and of compliment ? Are 
 they careful to consume their own smoke, and to bring only 
 an amiable face to the dinner-table ? 
 
 We are afraid not. The national manners need improv- 
 ing. The amenities of home can alone make up for the 
 national disadvantage. It is at the home dinner-table, by 
 the hearth-stone, the evening fireside, in the nursery, the 
 bedroom and the sick-room, that manners must be taught. 
 
 We can not count upon outside influences for our chil- 
 dren. Home first, and home always, must be to them what 
 the external world is to the ignorant foreigner. There 
 every institution teaches him, by the iron bands of power 
 and custom, to be respectful. If he dares be otherwise, he 
 is an outlaw and a criminal. 
 
 The husband and wife should begin it, by treating each 
 other with a courtesy which, in the presence of servants, 
 should be almost formal. An English butler left an Ameri- 
 
10 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 can family because the gentleman said to him, '^ Tell my 
 wife to come here," instead of saying, as he should, *^ Ask 
 your mistress if she will- have the kindness to step here," 
 or, as the butler added, **He might have said, 'Ask Mrs. 
 So-and-so to have the kindness to step here. ' " 
 
 AYe little think how much these things influence ser- 
 vants. They are silent and not too kindly observers of our 
 lightest action, and are never to be treated familiarly if we 
 desire their respect and obedience. Kindness is one thing, 
 but familiarity is a very different and quite another thing. 
 
 Between parents and children there should never, even 
 with the fondest love, be the slightest relaxation in the 
 matter of a respectful obedience. . It is not now, as it was 
 in the days of our own fathers and mothers, the fashion to 
 be formally respectful. The son does not rise when his 
 father enters the room, or stop speaking because his father 
 is speaking. Perhaps it would be better if he did. But he 
 can be taught that he should treat his father differently 
 from other men. He can be taught to rise when his 
 mother leaves the table. He can be taught, by looks rather 
 than by words, to assume a certain respectful tone. Un- 
 doubtedly, the harassed and troubled American woman — old 
 before her time ; obliged to rush against wind and tide, 
 full of cares which pursue her like scorpions, embarrassed 
 by ill-trained, impertinent, and incapable servants — would 
 have a wrinkle less on her forehead, if she could be treated 
 with a little more respect by her sons and daughters ; and 
 certainly she would be no less happy if her grown-up son 
 would now and then take her to the theatre or to a picture- 
 gallery, and would not impress it on her mind that she is 
 an old woman, and therefore to be left to the solitude of 
 her own thoughts. 
 
 How does her mind go back to those days when she 
 with sleepless solicitude watched his helplessness ! How 
 does she think of her patient work by his bedside when he 
 
DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY. \\ 
 
 was ailing ! Does he ever wish to sit down and nurse her 
 when she is ill ? lie may say that the affections never go 
 backward ; but, at least, he might remember what she has 
 done for him — how she brought home the Christmas-tree, 
 which she decked for him ; not forgetting his daily amuse- 
 ments, how she sought to make his life an endless succes- 
 sion of delights ; how she wrought, in sickness and in 
 health, at his *^ little coat," that he might be fine ; and how 
 proud she was of him, when, after her teaching, he took 
 the prize at school. 
 
 Now, wrapped in his own pleasures, or business, or love, 
 how often does he think of her or her pleasure ? Does he 
 try to make her happy in her own way — the only way in 
 which we can any of us be happy ? No, the American son 
 does not treat his mother with much politeness, as a gen- 
 eral rule ; nor do her daughters always err on the side of 
 too much delicate devotion, or err with a too respectful 
 manner. 
 
 We have no power to write a counter-irritant to " Daisy 
 Miller," whose mother was the last person to be informed 
 of the engagement of her daughter. There are many 
 mothers who constitute themselves the upper servants of 
 their daughters, and who consider the daughter as the best 
 judge of her own actions. Such a mother must, of course, 
 take the consequenees of her own folly, and bear with what- 
 ever sort of treatment her daughter chooses to give her. 
 We can not make them over, such unwise mothers. 
 
 But for the future there is always hope. We can begin 
 with a young home, a young mother ; and from experience, 
 and from the memory of mistakes, we can try to teach a 
 better code, feeling sure that, when mothers appreciate 
 how far-reaching are the amenities of home, they will try 
 to make the nursery the infant scJ[iool, as the parlor and 
 dining-room should be the college and university, of a new 
 and an improved system of national manners. 
 
II. 
 THE MOTHER BEGINS. 
 
 The mother should therefore try, above every other 
 thmg, for respectful servants. She should demand that 
 quality, even before efficiency, as the one great desideratum. 
 She must not allow herself to be treated with disrespect. 
 The little creature sitting on her lap is to be influenced for 
 life by that hour in the nursery when he sees her author- 
 ity outraged. For, before the lips speak, the little brain is 
 working, the bright eyes are taking in the situation, and 
 the baby is sitting in judgment on his mother. She must 
 be worthy of that judgment. 
 
 Above all things, let him never see her lose her temper. 
 The nurse will then have an advantage which will strike 
 the impartial judge. A woman at the head of the house 
 should be as calm and as imperturbable and as immovable as 
 Mont Blanc, to be the model mistress. Of course, this is 
 often difficult, but it is not impossible. Again, when she has 
 given an order, she must see that it is obeyed, even if it 
 costs her a great deal of trouble. It is worth the trouble to 
 be disagreeably pertinacious on this point and inflexible, 
 even to the degree of being tiresome, as it establishes a prec- 
 edent, A lady who was a pattern housekeeper made a 
 rule that her waitress should bring her a glass of water at 
 six o'clock every morning, and no woman who disregarded 
 that rule was allowed to stay in her house. Every one 
 thought this very unnecessary ; but they admired the punct- 
 
THE MOTHER BEGINS. 13 
 
 iiality with which the eight-o'clock breakfast was served. 
 **Do you not know/' said the wise housekeeper, *'that my 
 inflexible rule brings about the certainty of her early ris- 
 ing?" And as nothing conduces so thoroughly to the 
 health and welfare of children as regularity, this was an 
 admirable beginning for the young mother. 
 
 It is almost impossible, with some families, to have 
 young children at the table with their parents ; they are 
 left almost necessarily to the care of nurses at meal-time. 
 The result is, of course, that they get bad manners at the 
 table. A mother should try to eat at least one meal a day 
 with her child, so as to begin at the beginning with his 
 table manners. 
 
 And those important things, accent and pronunciation ! 
 What sins do not Americans commit in their slovenly mis- 
 use of their own tongue ? Educated men, scientific men, 
 often so mispronounce their words, or speak with so pal- 
 pable a Yankee twang, that they are unfitted to become 
 public speakers. It would be a good thing for every Ameri- 
 can household, could they employ one English girl, with 
 the good pronunciation which is the common inheritance 
 of all the well-trained servants in those parts of rural Eng- 
 land where the ladies take an interest in the peasantry. A 
 mother should be very careful to talk much to her children ; 
 to watch their earliest accent as they begin to go to school ; 
 and to try and impress a good pronunciation upon them 
 in their first lisping talk. 
 
 It is very much the fashion now even for people of 
 wealth to have a polyglot family of servants — a German 
 nurse and a French governess, an English rnaid and a Span- 
 ish waiter — thinking that their children will pick up a dozen 
 languages with their playthings. But, although they do 
 learn a smattering, children rarely learn a language well in 
 this way ; and it is quite certain that they will never know 
 their own language as correctly as if they learned that first, 
 2 
 
14 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 and perfectly. To learn to spell in English correctly, Eng- 
 lish must be taught before the other languages come in to 
 confuse the mind. 
 
 A French servant in the house, when the children get 
 to be seyen or eight, if one can find an honest one, is a most 
 excellent addition. Children should begin French very 
 early, as it is now so all-important to speak it well, and 
 the constant use of the common phrases in childhood saves 
 the French pupil much time and annoyance in after-days. 
 
 The trouble with us in America is the getting of good 
 and conscientious Frenchwomen. French servants are so 
 prone to lie, deeming it far less a sin than ite of the An- 
 glo-Saxon race, that a young mother generally gives up in 
 despair. It is on record that a child of seven went to his 
 mother, and complained of his French nurse thus : '^Mam- 
 ma, I can not understand Melanie, except I kno ^ that she 
 doesn't tell the truth." To teach children to reverence the 
 truth is of far more importance than to give them a good 
 French accent ; so that the French nurse is sent away in 
 nine cases out of ten. 
 
 However, perseverance is rewarded in this case as in every 
 other. If a mother works away at it, she may get good 
 French servants who will tell the truth. French Protes- 
 tants are more apt to tell the truth than French Catholics ; 
 but it is now almost decided that truth is a matter of race. 
 '^The Saxon man," says Emerson, '^with open front and 
 honest meaning, domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out 
 of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made ; but he 
 is molded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nur- 
 ture of children, for the truth, for colleges, churches, chari- 
 ties, and colonies." 
 
 A mother should try to be at home when her children 
 return from school. She must of course be out sometimes ; 
 but that hour she should try to ba in, to receive the little 
 fatigued, miserable child, who has endured the slavery of 
 
THE MOTHER BEGINS. 15 
 
 desks and books, classes, bad air, and enforced tasks which 
 wo cull ^* school." 
 
 If we called it racks, thumb-screws, the boot, the pulley, 
 and the torture, as they did similar institutions in the Middle 
 Ages, we should be more true to the facts. The modern 
 teacher extorts confessions of how much is eight times eight, 
 or what are the boundaries of Pennsylvania, or the declen- 
 sion of a Latin noun, in the midst of heat, bad air, and 
 general oppression and suffering such as few chambers of 
 torture ever equaled. The boy comes home with burning 
 brow, perhaps with a headache ; tired, angry, and depressed, 
 to know that all is to be repeated on the morrow. If his 
 mother is at home, he rushes to her room. Let her have 
 patience and sympathy, for it is his crucial hour. Let her 
 bathe his head and hands ; give him a good lunch, at which 
 she presides herself ; hear all his grievances, and smooth 
 them over ; and then send him out to play for an hour or 
 two in the open air. When he must study in the evening, 
 both father and mother should tackle the hard Latin and 
 Greek, the arithmetic and the geography, with the boy, and 
 if possible smooth the thorny road which leads else to de- 
 spair. 
 
 The animals know how to take care of their young better 
 than we do. The human race has no inspiration on the 
 subject. A young fox is educated for his sphere in life 
 much more easily than is a human boy. We have not con- 
 quered the secrets of doing the best for our children, or else 
 we certainly should have learned how to make education 
 more agreeable. Perhaps the Kindergarten is the first move 
 in the right direction, for we find children very happy ther3. 
 Certainly a boys' school or a girls' school, with bad air and 
 enforced tasks, is not a happy place. Dickens had a realizing 
 sense of the miseries of school, and has painted for us the 
 tragedy of Paul Dombey in colors which will never fade : 
 
 *^^The ancient Romans, sir,'" began Dr. Blimber to 
 
16 AMENITIES OF EOME. 
 
 Mr. Feeder. *^At the mention of these terrible people — 
 their natural enemies — every boy grew pale," says that im- 
 mortal author in ^^Dombey and Son." 
 
 The Kindergarten offers to mothers that great desidera- 
 tum, an amusing school, and it may not be out of place here 
 to refer to the laws which govern the '' United Home at 
 Guise," that latest French effort at living in *^ community," 
 confining ourselves to the part which concerns children 
 alone. 
 
 " At eight o'clock there is a sound of pleasure and hilarity in the 
 central court, and soon a lively chorus of voices is heard, and the 
 children are seen marching in double column from the central court 
 across the open square to the schoolrooms opposite. They sing in 
 perfect harmony, with a freshness of tone and an evenness of utter- 
 ance that denote a happy spirit and thorough training. They march 
 in exact step, the several teachers walking between the lines, and a 
 pupil as standard-bearer leading the scholars of each department. 
 There are several banners in the procession, and many of the chil- 
 dren are decorated with a ribbon or badge, indicative of meritorious 
 conduct or acquisition in the schools. 
 
 "The younger children of the institution do not enter the school 
 at this early hour. Some of the harnMns — children from four to six 
 — ^may be seen at this time in the open square or in the courts. But 
 they are nearly always in groups. Very seldom is one seen walking 
 or playing alone. They seem to gravitate to one another as invol- 
 untarily as the atoms in a crystal ; and, one might almost say, to 
 group themselves in as definite an order. They tend always to even 
 step and a line of march, often with their hands upon one another's 
 shoulders, the child in front bearing the scepter of leadership, in the 
 shape of an uplifted stick, and all joining in some melody learned in 
 the schoolroom. 
 
 " The sentiment of fraternity, or the principle of mutual protec- 
 tion, is especially observable among the children of the institution, 
 in whom, by the conditions of the home-life and the system of edu- 
 cation, it becomes as a second nature. With them it forms the mo- 
 tive of action, not as duty, but as pleasure. This was manifested to 
 me in an amusing manner one morning, as I sat at the window of 
 
TEE MOTHER BEGINS. 17 
 
 my pleasant room, watching a group of five or six cliildren of the 
 hambinot in the open square below. There was a little rain falling. 
 According to their usual custom, the children had no caps upon their 
 heads, the proximity of the schoolrooms rendering that article of ap- 
 parel for the most part superfluous. But, as they wished at this time 
 to cross the square, and it would necessitate exposure to the slight 
 showers, it occurred to the leader of the troop to put the tail of his 
 waistcoat over the head of his immediate follower, and this last re- 
 solved at once to afford the like protection to his neighbor in the 
 rear, and so the mutual helpfulness went on until all were sheltered 
 except the leader, who was only too eager and happy to evince by 
 his voluntary exposure the qualities of an able general. 
 
 " During my entire visit at the Familistere, in all my walks and 
 observation, I heard no quarreling among the children, no harsh 
 words in hours of recreation, saw no exhibition of ill-feeling one 
 toward another. Of course it is not natural to suppose that these 
 frailties of human nature find no expression there; but that it occurs 
 far more rarely than in ordinary society is evident, or it would have 
 come to my observation during a period of five weeks. 
 
 *' I did not either find any evidence of the infliction of corporal 
 punishment, even in the slightest degree, in the nursery, the other 
 educational departments, or in the Home. On the contrary, I ob- 
 served a mingled firmness and forbearance on the part of the guar- 
 dians and teachers, and always a tender manifestation of the parents' 
 affection for the child, which is a charm in the French character. 
 
 " There are two hundred and seventy-nine children in the insti- 
 tution. They have an air of freedom and happiness, despite their 
 almost constant tutelage, and therefore much spontaneity. Tiiis is 
 because the methods of education are such as to guide and balance 
 the tendencies of human nature rather than subvert them. The 
 spontaneity to which I refer does not impair the general good man- 
 ners of the children. The boys who raise a shout of freedom when 
 they disband in the central court do not, in their most hilarious 
 gallop, go tilting against their superiors, and the little girls are ex- 
 quisite with their never-forgotten ' Bon jour, Madame,' if you smile 
 a salute to them. 
 
 " At nine o'clock in the morning the children who entered the 
 schoolroom at eight o'clock march back in the same order with their 
 teachers to the Familistere, and the workmen return from the work- 
 
18 AMENITIES OF HOME, 
 
 sliops. It is the liour of breakfast for the population. At ten 
 o'clock labor and study are resumed, the babies are carried to the 
 nursery, and the children from two to four years of age enter the 
 school. At one o'clock in the afternoon all the pupils, again march- 
 ing to the music of their own voices, return for the second breakfast. 
 The workmen arrive perliaps a little later, and neither study nor 
 •employment is resumed until tliree o'clock. There is time for that 
 complete relaxation whicli insures good digestion. 
 
 " In this interval, if we follow the road that leads north of the 
 garden and the palace, we come upon many of the men who work 
 in the foundries, and who do not inhabit the Familistere. They are 
 scattered or grouped in the shade of the beautiful trees which border 
 the roadside. Some are busy with the ample meal which the sun- 
 browned wife or daughter has brought them from the distant cot- 
 tage. Others, with repnst finished, and with heads pillowed upon 
 their arm?, are stretched in deep repose on the cool green grnss." 
 
 We have made this long excerpt from the account of 
 Monsieur Godin's " United Home " at Guise, because it is, 
 in the first place, very interesting, and, in the second place, 
 because it bears upon two very important questions : the 
 first one, corporal punishment ; the second, the influence 
 of music. 
 
 Now, in the education of children with a view toward 
 the amenities, does it seem probable that a child who is 
 struck and whipped will become as gentle and amiable as 
 one who is always treated with a firm and consistent and 
 equable kindness ? The ** sparing the rod and spoiling the 
 child " question is one which has not been answered. 
 
 The violent-tempered and easily irritated child is often 
 apparently much relieved by what is called, in familiar par- 
 lance, a *^good whipping." It seems to carry oft* a certain 
 '^malaise," which he is glad to get rid of. Whether a ride 
 on donkey-back, a row on the river, or a hearty run would 
 not do it as well, there is no possible means of deciding. 
 But to cuff a child's ears, to shake him, to whip him often, 
 is to arouse all that is worse in his nature. The human 
 
THE MOTHER BEGINS. 19 
 
 body is sacred, and a parent should hesitate to outrage that 
 natural dignity which is born in every sensitive child. 
 
 If the amenities of home are to begin early, we should 
 recommend a great prudence as ta the administration of 
 corporal punishment ; but, that it should be entirely ban- 
 ished, no one can say. There are all sorts of children born 
 into the world. No one can decide as to what sort of 
 treatment would have made Jesse Pomeroy a better boy, 
 as he seems to have been born a fiend. No one can, on 
 the other hand, recommend the conduct of the clergyman 
 who whipped his child to death because the little fright- 
 ened creature would not say his prayers. The kind and 
 good mother will be apt to find the mean between the two. 
 
 The other point of which we are reminded by the ac- 
 count of the French Familistere is the influence of music. 
 
 Every mother learns that, from the cradle-song up to the 
 dancing tune which she plays on the piano, her greatest 
 help in the work of education and in her attempt at the 
 amenities is music. Nothing is so perfect as the work 
 and aid of this divine messenger in the otherwise .insolu- 
 ble problem of the nursery. A song often puts a sick 
 baby to sleep. It is sure, if it is a simple ballad and if it 
 tells a story, to interest the boys and girls. What mother 
 who can sing has not felt her deep indebtedness to the 
 '^Heir of Linn," "Young Lochinvar," "The Campbells 
 are Coming," " Lizzie Lindsay," " What's a' the steer, 
 Kimmer ?" " Auld Eobin Grey," and even to the homely 
 "Old Grimes is Dead," and the familiar nursery rhymes of 
 Mother Goose set to the simplest of tunes ? 
 
 A famous statesman and orator said, in one of his best 
 speeches, that he could never think of "' Kathleen Moore," 
 as his mother sang it, without the tears coming to his eyes, 
 and he had often wondered what power of oratory she pos- 
 sessed that he had not inherited, what nerve she contrived 
 to reach which none of his polished periods could conquer. 
 
20 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 He should have remembered that the "hearer's mood is the 
 speaker's opportunity," and he should thank her that she 
 aroused in him the early softer emotion which the battle 
 of life has not quite rubbed out. 
 
 Children like to march. The rhythmic instinct is in- 
 born ; they like to dance, to move in phalanxes . The 
 French have caught this element of concord and have uti- 
 lized it. It is introduced here into our public schools, and 
 to any one who has seen the Normal College, where a regi- 
 ment as large as the Seventh — a regiment of girls — marches 
 in to music, the story need not be told of the influence of 
 music upon order. At home, the evening dance by the 
 firelight, the mother playing for her children, is always a 
 picture of happiness and glee. 
 
 Boys, as well as girls, should be taught to play upon 
 some musical instrument. It has the most admirable effect 
 upon the amenities of home. No more soothing or more 
 refining influence can be introduced than the home concert. 
 To vary the usual custom and to give variety, let a girl 
 learn the violin and a boy the piano. It is very interesting 
 to see the usual position occasionally reversed, and there is 
 nothing ungraceful or unfeminine in the use of the violin. 
 Very few natures are so coarse or so fierce that they can not 
 be reached by music. 
 
 "I had," said a woman who Avas famed for her lovely 
 manners, 'Hhe good fortune to have a musical papa. He 
 used to wake me in the morning by playing Mozart's 
 * Batti, Batti,' on the flute, and he always, although a busy 
 lawyer, gave us an hour in the evening with his violin. I 
 am sure Strauss, with his famous Vienna Orchestra and his 
 world-renowned waltzes, has never put such a thrill into my 
 nerves or such quicksilver into my heels as did my father's 
 playing of the Virginia Eeel and the first movement of 
 Von Weber's ^Invitation a la Valse,' nor have I ever heard 
 such solemn notes as those which came from his violoncello. 
 
THE MOTHER BEGINS. 21 
 
 as he accompanied my mother in the Funeral March in the 
 * Seventh Symphony.' Their music made home a more 
 attractive spot than any theatre or ball. They were neither 
 of them great musicians. I dare say their playing would 
 have been considered .very amateurish in th3se days of mu- 
 sical excellence. But it served the purpose ol: making home 
 a very peaceful spot to their boys and girls, and of keeping 
 it a memory of delight through much that was trying in 
 the Avay of small income, personal self-sacrifice, and ill- 
 health. We had our trials, but everything vanished when 
 father began to play." 
 
 We can not, in our scheme of life, always command a 
 musical papa, but this testimony is invaluable. Children 
 should always be taught to sing unless hopelessly defective 
 in musical organization — a fact which can only be ascer- 
 tained by trial. The great use of the Kindergarten is per- 
 haps in this unconscious development of a voice and the 
 power of keeping time and tune. Many a child, whose mu- 
 sical gift would have remained unknown, suddenly devel- 
 ops a beautiful voice in the chorus of the school. 
 
 Here the mother should be the first teacher, and the 
 world is now happily full of books to help her. The 
 "Songs of Harrow," edited by the head-master, contain 
 beautiful simple part-songs for boys, and there are hun- 
 dreds of such compilations for girls. To the Countess of 
 Dufferin we owe the introduction of the singing quadrilles, 
 where, to the Mother Goose poems of *^ Mary, Mary, quite 
 contrary," and " Kide a Cock-horse to Banbury Cross," have 
 been married certain very good old English tunes, which 
 the dancers sing in different parts as they dance, making a 
 charming effect. The Christmas Carols, the English Mad- 
 rigals, Song of the Waits, Old English glees and ballads, are 
 simple, delightful, pure, and elevating. The mother need 
 not be afraid of these aids to the home amenities. They 
 may not do all that she may wish to make her children 
 
22 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 cultivated musicians, but they will do much. The oppor- 
 tunities for musical culture are very great in our cities now, 
 and we should not forget that, in giving our children a mu- 
 sical education, we are giving them a defense against ennui, 
 a new and undying means of amusing tllemselves, but also 
 a means of making their own future homes happy, that we 
 aid them in an accomplishment which will be always use- 
 ful, often also remunerative, and with which they can help 
 to swell the praises of our Lord and to cheer the bedside 
 of the sick and dying. 
 
 It is not, of course, universal that the manners of musi- 
 cians are perfect, but it has never been urged against music, 
 that it injured the manners. Certainly, in a household, 
 music when once learned can help to increase — the ameni- 
 ties. 
 
III. 
 
 A SUBTILE SYMPATHY. 
 
 Ik order to make home happy to a child, he should 
 never be laughed at. The chaotic view of life which pre- 
 sents itself to a child, we can all remember ; how we only 
 half understood things or how we misapprehended them 
 altogether ; how formalists wearied us, and gave us texts 
 which we could not remember ; and how the hasty and the 
 heartless trampled down the virgin buds of good resolve 
 and of heroic endeavor. Our early heartbreaks are never 
 quite forgotten, nor can we recall them without tears. 
 They are, of course, a part of the forging of the armor. We 
 have to be hammered into shape by all sorts of hard blows 
 before we are good for anything. The only thing we can 
 ask is that the strokes be so well given that we are not bent 
 awry ; that the character does not receive some fatal twist 
 from which it never recovers. 
 
 " He comes, and lays my heart all heated 
 
 On the hard anvil, minded so 
 Into his own fair shape to beat it 
 
 With his great hammer, blow on blow; 
 And yet I whisper, 'As God will! ' 
 And at his heaviest blows lie still. 
 
 "He takes my softened heart, and beats it, 
 
 The sparks fly off at every blow ; 
 He turns it o'er and o'er and heats it, 
 
 And lets it cool and makes it glow ; 
 And yet I whisper, 'As God will! ' 
 And in his mighty hand lie still." 
 
24 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 We are all on God's anvil, to be thus molded, but, in a 
 lesser degree, our children are in our hands to be shaped 
 into the image of their Maker. Shall we, in addition to all 
 the sorrows which must come to them later, afflict them in 
 their sensitive childhood with our scorn, our ridicule, or 
 our lack of comprehension ? 
 
 A Sunday-school teacher after long effort thought that 
 she had impressed the text '^ A soft answer turneth away 
 wrath " upon a child's mind, to hear her repeat with much 
 unction these words : '^Asoft anchor turns to grass, but 
 green words stir the ankles." Again she gave out some- 
 thing about the ^* pomps and vanities of this world," which 
 the memory of her scholar brought back as the "pumps 
 and manacles." It was not in human nature not to smile 
 at this rendering of our English Bible, and the child burst 
 into tears, and left the school, never to come back again. 
 Who can follow the bewildered mazes of that intellect as it 
 sought and failed to catch the unfamiliar words of the text ? 
 
 One lady of remarkable intelligence assures us that 
 until she was eighteen she always, in her nightly supplica- 
 tions, said, *^ Forgive us this day our daily bread," under 
 some childish hallucination that our daily bread was sup- 
 posed to have sinned, or that we were to be forgiven for 
 being always hungry. It would not have been a more ab- 
 surd bit of theology than many which have held the world 
 in chains for many years. 
 
 A child will not, for some inscrutable reason, tell the 
 secrets of its soul. It will not let us know when we hurt 
 it, and hoAV. We must be careful, through sympathy and 
 through memory, to find that art. 
 
 One of the most powerful sketches of a child's suffer- 
 ings is to be found in George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver, in the 
 " Mill on the Floss." Many a grown man or woman, on 
 reading that, has said, "It is a picture of my early suffer- 
 ings. Poor Maggie ! " 
 
A SUBTILE SYMPATHY. 25 
 
 A sullen temper gives to a mother an almost incurable 
 obstacle in the way of good manners, and yet a sullen tem- 
 per is very often an affectionate temper soured. 
 
 It pains a mother often after her children have grown 
 up to hear them say that their childhood was an unhappy 
 one ; that they were never understood ; that she laughed 
 when she should have been serious, and was serious when 
 she should have laughed ; that they had terrors by night 
 which she never drove away ; and that their mortifications 
 by day were increased by her determination that they 
 should wear broad collars instead of narrow ones, such as 
 the other boys wore, and so on. She can only say, *^ I did 
 my best, I did my best for you,'' and regret that she had 
 not been inspired. 
 
 But while the children are young, as indeed after they 
 are grown, a parent should try to sympathize with the vari- 
 ous irregular growths of a child's nature. Sensitiveness as 
 to peculiarities of dress is a very strong element, and it can 
 not be laughed down. The late admirable Lydia Maria 
 Child said that she believed her character had been perma- 
 nently injured by the laughter of her schoolmates at a 
 peculiar short-waisted gown which her mother made her 
 wear to school. And a very sensible mother, who would not 
 allow her little daughter to wear a hoop to dancing-school 
 when hoops were the fashion, said that she was certain that, 
 by the mortification she had caused her, and the undue 
 attention which had been given to the subject, she had 
 made love of dress a passion with the child. On all these 
 questions, a certain wholesome inattention is perhaps the 
 best treatment. Try to allow your child to be as much 
 like his fellows as you can ; and, above all things, do not 
 make him too splendid, for that hurts his feelings more 
 than anything, and makes the other boys laugh at him. 
 
 The ragged jacket, the poor shoes, the forlorn cap, the 
 deciduous pantaloon which has shed the leaves of fresh- 
 3 
 
26 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 ness — ^these are not laughed at ; they do not move the 
 youthful soul to ridicule. It is a lovely trait in the charac- 
 ter of boyhood that poverty is no disgrace. But a velvet 
 jacket, a peculiar collar, hair cut in a singular fashion, long 
 hair especially — these are cruel guide-posts to the young 
 bully. He makes the picturesque wearer whose prettiness 
 delights his mother suffer for this peculiar grace most 
 fearfully. 
 
 Little girls, more precocious than boys, suffer, however, 
 less from the pangs of ridicule ; yet they have their sorrows. 
 An intelligent and poetical girl is laughed at for her rhap- 
 sodies, her fine language, or her totally innocent exaggera- 
 tions. She gets the name of fib-teller when she is perhaps 
 but painting a bluer sky or describing a brighter sun than 
 her fellow-beings can see. But a little girl has generally 
 a great deal of vanity to help her along, and much tact to 
 tell her where to go, so that her sufferings are less severe 
 than those of a boy. She gravitates naturally toward the 
 amenities, and, if she is not a well-bred person, it is largely 
 the fault of her surroundings. 
 
IV. 
 
 EDUCATION AND MANNERS OF GIRLS. 
 
 We come now to the subject which perhaps has only re- 
 motely to do with the amenities of home, but much to do 
 with the welfare of the state. We must consider the two 
 extremes which are now being brought about by the eman- 
 cipation of young women. One is, their higher education, 
 the other is, the growing *^ fastness " of manner. 
 
 One can scarcely imagine amenity of manner without 
 education, and yet we are forced to observe that it can exist, 
 as we see the manners of highly educated and what are called 
 strong-minded women. Soft, gentle, and feminine man- 
 ners do not always accompany culture and education. In- 
 deed, preoccupation in literary matters used to be supposed 
 to unfit a woman for being a graceful member of society, 
 but nous avons change tout cela; and we are now in the very 
 midst of a well-dressed and well-mannered set of women 
 who work at their pen as Penelope at her web. 
 
 The home influence is, however, still needed for those 
 young daughters who begin early to live in books ; and 
 neatness in dress and order should be insisted upon by the 
 mother of a bookish, studious girl. All students are disposed 
 to be slovenly, excepting an unusual class, who, like the 
 Count de Buffin, write in lace ruffles and diamond rings. 
 Books are apt to soil the hands, and libraries, although they 
 look clean, are prone to accumulate dust. Ink is a very 
 permeating material, and creeps up under the middle fin- 
 
28 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 ger-nail. To appear with such evidences of guilt upon one 
 would make the prettiest woman unlovely. 
 
 The amenities of manner are not quite enough consid- 
 ered at some of our female colleges. With the college course 
 the young graduates are apt to copy masculine manners, 
 and we have heard of a class who cheered from a boat their 
 fellow-students at West Point. This is not graceful, and to 
 some minds would more than balance the advantages of 
 the severe course of study marked out and pursued at col- 
 lege. A mother with gentle and lady-like manners would, 
 however, soon counteract these masculine tendencies and 
 overflow of youthful spirits. We all detest a man who 
 copies the feminine style of dress, intonation, and gesture. 
 Why should a girl be any more attractive who wears an 
 ulster, a Derby hat, and who strides, puts her hands in her 
 pockets, and imitates her brother's style in walk and ges- 
 ture ? 
 
 However, to a girl who is absorbed in books, who is read- 
 ing, studying, and thinking, we can forgive much if she 
 only will come out a really cultivated woman. We know 
 that she will be a power in the state, an addition to the 
 better forces of our government ; that she will be not only 
 happy herself, but the cause of happiness in others. The 
 cultivated woman is a much more useful factor in civiliza- 
 tion than the vain, silly, and flippant woman, although the 
 latter may be prettier. But it is a great pity that, having 
 gone so far, she should not go further, and come out a cul- 
 tivated flower, instead of a learned weed. 
 
 Far more reprehensible and destructive of all amenities, 
 is the growing tendency to "fastness," an exotic which we 
 have imported from somewhere ; probably from the days of 
 the Empire in Paris. 
 
 It seems hardly possible that the " fast " woman of the 
 present, whose fashion has been achieved by her question- 
 able talk, her excessive dress, her doubtful manners, can 
 
EDUCATION AND MANNERS OF GIRLS. 29 
 
 have grown out of the same soil that produced Priscilla 
 Mullins. The old Puritan Fathers would have turned the 
 helm of the Mayflower the other way if they could have seen 
 the product of one hundred years of independence. Now 
 all Europe rings with the stories of American women, young, 
 beautiful, charmingly dressed, who live away from their 
 husbands, flirt with princes, make themselves the common 
 talk of all the nations, and are delighted with their own 
 notoriety. To educate daughters to such a fate seems to 
 recall the story of the Harpies. Surely no mother can 
 coolly contemplate it. And the amenities of home should 
 be so strict and so guarded that this fate would be impos- 
 sible. 
 
 In the first place, young girls should not be allowed to 
 walk in the crowded streets of New York alone ; a com- 
 panion, a friend, a maid, should always be sent with them. 
 Lady Thornton said, after one year's experience of Wash- 
 ington, '* I must bring on a very strict English governess 
 to walk about with my girls. " And in the various games 
 so much in fashion now, such as skating and lawn-tennis, 
 there is no doubt as much necessity for a chaperon as in 
 attending balls and parties. Not alone that impropriety is 
 to be checked, but that manners may be cultivated. A well- 
 bred woman who is shocked at slang, and who presents in 
 her own person a constant picture of good manners, is 
 like the atmosphere, a presence which is felt, and who un- 
 consciously educates the young persons about her. 
 
 " I have never gotten over Aunt Lydia's smile," said a 
 soldier on the plains, who, amid the terrible life of camp 
 and the perils of Indian warfare, had never lost the amen- 
 ities of civilized life. " When a boy I used to look up at 
 the table, through a long line of boisterous children clam- 
 oring for food, and see my Aunt Lydia's face. It never lost 
 its serenity, and when things were going very wrong she had 
 but to look at us and smile, to bring out all right. She 
 
30 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 seemed to say with that silent smile, 'Be. patient, be strong, 
 be gentle, and all Avill come right. ' " 
 
 The maiden aunt was a perpetual benediction in that 
 house, because of her manner ; it was, of course, the out- 
 crop of a fine, well-regulated, sweet character ; but suppos- 
 ing she had had the character with a disagreeable manner ? 
 The result would have been lost. 
 
 We have all visited in families where the large flock of 
 children came forward to meet us with outstretched hand 
 and ready smile. We have seen them at table, peaceful and 
 quiet, waiting their turn. We have also visited in other 
 houses where we have found them discourteous, sullen, ill- 
 mannered, and noisy. We know that the latter have all 
 the talent, the good natural gifts, the originality, and the 
 honor of the former. We know that the parents have just 
 as much desire in the latter case to bring up their children 
 well, but where have they failed ? They have wanted firm- 
 ness and an attention to the amenities. 
 
RESPECT FOR THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. 
 
 As boys and girls grow up to manhood and woman- 
 hood, parents should respect that nascent dignity which 
 comes with the age — they should respect individuality. It 
 is one reason, perhaps, why sisters can not always live to- 
 gether happily, that neither has been taught to respect the 
 other's strong peculiarity of character, at least in outward 
 manner. If we treated our brothers and sisters with the 
 same respect that we treat our formal acquaintances in 
 matters of friendship, opinion, and taste, there would he 
 gi'eater harmony in households. 
 
 One of the first and most apparent duties is to respect 
 a seal. Never open your children's letters after they are 
 old enough to read them. It is a curious element of self- 
 respect that this "community of letters" which exists in 
 some families hurts the feelings of a young per83n from the 
 first. Certain coarse-grained parents or relatives tear open 
 Sam's letters from Dick and laugh at them. Certain 
 other parents consider it a duty to open their daughter's 
 love-letters. 
 
 Perhaps in the attempt to keep a daughter from marry- 
 ing improperly, any kind of warfare is allowable. Ex- 
 traordinary circumstances make extraordinary precautions 
 proper ; hut it should be the last resort. No girl is made 
 better by espionage. If she is a natural born intriguante, 
 no surveillance will defeat her (we are glad to go out of 
 
32 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 the honest English tongue to find words to express these 
 hateful ideas). If she is, as are most girls, trembling in 
 the balance between deceit and honesty, a fair, open deal- 
 ing, a belief in her, will bring her all right. Do not set 
 servants to watch her. Do not open her letters. Do not 
 spy on her acts or abuse her friends. She will be far more 
 apt to come right if she is treated as if she were certain to 
 be true, frank, and honorable in all her acts. 
 
 As for young boys and men, belief in their word, con- 
 fidence in their honesty, is the way to make them honor- 
 able gentlemen. Be careful, as we have said before, not 
 to laugh at them ; respect their correspondence. If the 
 rough-and-tumble of a public school is to be their portion, 
 there is no fear that the amenities of home will make them 
 effete. They will need all their polish as they go knocking 
 through the world. 
 
 A husband should never open his wife's letters, or a 
 wife her husband's. All people have their individual con- 
 fidences which each is bound to respect. A woman of 
 large sympathies and wise thoughts, of virtuous life and 
 clear head, is sure to have a large correspondence . Many 
 weaker people write to her for advice, consolation, and 
 help. It is an outrage upon their belief in her if her hus- 
 band reads those letters. The correspondent is not telling 
 her secrets to him. If a wife is carrying on a love affair, 
 her husband may be quite sure that he will be baffled ; 
 therefore his jealousy will not be gratified on opening her 
 letters. Still less should a wife open her husband's letters. 
 But we are not in the days of Othello and Desdemona, 
 nor are we dealing with passions and jealousies ; we are 
 not treating with such questions as these. We will end 
 this by repeating the old adage that '^ a seal is as strong as 
 a lock." If the opening of letters is a fact which is treated 
 carelessly in many families, it becomes a part of that 
 thoughtless disregard of individuality which is remotely 
 
RESPECT FOR THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. 33 
 
 so much the cause of unhappiness at home. ''Did we but 
 think," says the careless person. Exactly ! ''Did we but 
 remember." Yes ! To think, to remember, to consider 
 the claims of all about us, particularly at home, is the be- 
 ginning of "the amenities." 
 
 One should be particular about paying small debts to 
 the members of the family. Tom borrows car-fare from 
 Dick and forgets to return it. Sarah borrows a dollar 
 from Louisa and forgets to return it. Then come recrim- 
 inations and strife. There should be, in the first place, an 
 effort to avoid borrowing. Nothing is so good for children 
 as to give them an allowance, and to insist upon its lasting. 
 It teaches them economy and thrift. If this is impossible, 
 then instruct them in the impropriety of borrowing and 
 the necessity of prompt payments. Of course this is all a 
 part of the theory of respecting the rights of others. We 
 are none of us too old or too perfect to be beyond instruc- 
 tion in this matter. 
 
 And, in the education of the young, parents should en- 
 courage individuality. They should not try to smoothe off 
 their children to a dead level of uniformity. If Rosa can 
 draw, put a pencil in her hand and encourage her. If 
 Lucy can Avrite, give her plenty of foolscap. If Bob wants 
 to go to sea, let him strive for the naval academy. If Ar- 
 thur is a natural orator, bring him up for the law. If 
 Charles is devotional, strive to fan the flame which may 
 make him a preacher. If Max has a tendency to save his 
 pennies, try in the first place to make him philanthropic, 
 so that he will not end in being a miser ; but let him be 
 educated to business. If Peter shows a decided taste for 
 art, by all means cultivate it. We need artists in America, 
 and they are no longer struggling visionaries. 
 
 Our education of girls tends chiefly toward making 
 them admirable figures in society, and to a certain extent 
 this is right. But, if she has nothing behind that worldly 
 
34 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 training, the young girl is apt, after a short worldly experi- 
 ence, either to violently react and to hate it all ; she either 
 grows morbidly sensitive to opinion, or she stagnates into 
 conventionality — either of which extremes should be avoid- 
 ed. There is no sadder sight than to see our young women 
 growing up with no high aims or thoughts to guide them. 
 Society is her power. She is the future regenerator, the 
 preserver of society. If her aims are high and pure, society 
 will be high and pure. 
 
 De Tocqueville said many years ago, in his book ^'De- 
 mocracy in America," '' If I were asked to what the singular 
 prosperity and growing strength of the Americans ought 
 mainly to be attributed, I should reply. To the superiority 
 of their women." This is high praise, and the young 
 women of America should not consent to go below it. 
 
 But it is to be regretted that the high standard of dig- 
 nity, in the manners of both the men and women of this 
 country (and shall I say their characters ?), has steadily 
 retrograded since the days following the Eevolution. There 
 was then lingering in our country many an English tradi- 
 tion of reverence now forgotten or considered obsolete. 
 
 There was a great necessity of economy. Every house- 
 wife had to look well after the affairs of her household. 
 There were fewer and better servants, and the lady of the 
 house felt her responsibilities more. There was less liv- 
 ing in boarding-houses and hotels. Home was a more 
 sacred place. The amenities of home were more carefully 
 observed. It is to be feared that we are losing that high 
 ideal. We are going on and on and on, dropping many 
 an embroidered mantle of good manners as we run. 
 
 The sudden accession of wealth should not make people 
 less well-mannered. The pursuit of wealth is no doubt 
 very destructive to good manners, but when it is won, as it 
 now is by so many Americans, should it not bring back all 
 those amenities, as we are bringing back the brocades, the 
 
RESPECT FOR THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. 35 
 
 bureaus, the old clocks, and the carved mantelpieces of our 
 Revolutionary forefathers ? We are beginning to find out 
 that they built better houses in colonial times than we do ; 
 that they had more elegant interiors ; that their fireplaces 
 are things to copy ; that there is no such furniture as their 
 claw-footed mahogany chairs. And we should remember 
 that the manners of those pretty great-grandmothers of 
 ours, whom Copley painted, were as well worth our copying 
 as are the chairs in which they sat or the fireplaces which 
 they looked at. 
 
 The picture of the old-time lady sitting in her parlor, to 
 receive the hand-kiss from her sons and the respectful sub- 
 mission of her daughters — such a one of whom her son said, 
 "You can not imagine my horror when I once believed, 
 the next morning, that my mother had seen me drunk " — 
 the dignified matron, who still, in her early morning desha- 
 bille, which was as neat and pretty as her afternoon silk 
 was elegant, attended to her household duties, and taught 
 her children the secrets of cookery ; she who was from youth 
 to age a pattern of dignity and the domestic virtues, she — 
 is a vanished picture. 
 
 To be sure, the times have changed. The married flirt 
 has come in, a being unknown in the days of the fine old 
 colonial lady whom Copley painted, and as unlike to her as 
 is the painted, gilded, twisted looking-glass frame, of the 
 poorer fashion of ten years ago, to the severely simple and 
 classically elegant frame which our grandmothers saw sur- 
 rounding their own charming images. The married flirt, 
 hardened, dexterous, capable of preserving her place at the 
 head of a household by her imperturbable hypocrisy and 
 vulgar cunning, held in favor by that universal and 
 national mistake of adoring success which is our American 
 mistake — what sort of a home does she make ? "What rever- 
 ence for womanhood will she inspire in her growing son ? 
 
 Fit mother, she ! for the young speculator, gambler, and 
 
36 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 fraud, who is a great man, a hero, until he fails, and then 
 a very degraded and abased ruffian. ^"0 language is suffi- 
 ciently abusive for the man who has failed. Americans 
 never forgive a failure. 
 
 The word " familiarity " was unknown to the women 
 whom Copley painted. They were surrounded with respect 
 and dignity. If a woman fell, great was the fall thereof, 
 and she left her place among the matrons. The shadow of 
 the " Scarlet Letter" drove even the innocently suspected 
 from the ranks of society. Far different from our times, 
 when a reputation for "fastness" is sought as a means of 
 obtaining a fashionable position. 
 
 The rich parvenu society, which, like a mushroom 
 growth, follows suddenly acquired wealth, is now apt to be 
 exceedingly fast and utterly rowdy. Here and there, per- 
 sons of native refinement and an intuitive sense of the be- 
 coming, endeavor to stem the tide ; but feebly, for the 
 tides of fashion are like those which pour into the Bay 
 of Fundy, irresistible, carrying all before them on their 
 tremendous waves. Fastness and fashion and folly are 
 cumulative, and, if one woman makes herself noticed by 
 eccentric defiance of what was once considered decency, 
 another, a thousand others, follows in her wake, thinking 
 that this defiance is the thing. One beautiful "fast" 
 woman who succeeds makes a hundred converts. She is 
 conspicuous, like a balloon, and no one stops to ask whether 
 the gas will cause her to explode, or where she will alight 
 when she comes down. The only criticism is, "What a 
 sensation she makes going up ! " This is not alone a feat- 
 ure of our American society, but of the English mod- 
 ern fashion, as we can but learn from the articles in the 
 "Saturday Review," "The London Truth," and "The 
 World." In an article called " The Maiden's Progress," in 
 a late issue of Edmund Yates's paper, we hear the most start- 
 ling opinions pronounced upon the young English maiden 
 
RESPECT FOR THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. 37 
 
 of to-day and her growing freedom of manner. Giddiness 
 and forwardness, according to the '^Saturday Review," are 
 the prominent characteristics of these young English girls 
 whom we have loved to consider like 
 
 "A violet, by a mossj stone, 
 Half hidden from the eye." 
 
 Much of this change is attributed to the Prince of 
 "Wales, who, as a noble lady of the old school said, " is not 
 in good society in England." Another cause is said to be 
 owing to the peers and baronets of recent creation having 
 been raised by their wealth to rank and title, who are sup- 
 posed to bring in false standards of honor. 
 
 If the English home fail us, where shall we look ? Emer- 
 son says: ^'^ Domesticity is the tap-root which enables the 
 nation to branch high and wide. The motive and end of 
 their trade and empire is to guard the independence and 
 privacy of their homes, Nothing so much marks their 
 manners as the concentration on their household ties. 
 This domesticity is carried into court and camp. The song 
 of 1596 says, 'The wife of every Englishman is counted 
 blest.' The sentiment of Imogen in 'Cymbeline' is copied 
 from English nature, and not less the Portia of Brutus, the 
 Kate Percy, and the Desdemona. The romance does not ex- 
 ceed the height of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson 
 or in Lady Eussell, or even, as one discerns through the 
 plain prose of Pepys's 'Diary,' the sacred habit of an Eng- 
 lish wife. Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear the death of 
 his wife. Every class has its noble and tender examples. 
 England produces under favorable conditions of ease and 
 culture the finest women in the world ; and, as the men are 
 affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine 
 them. Nothing can be more delicate without being fantas- 
 tical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, 
 than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes." So 
 
38 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 much for a noble picture painted in 1857. So much for 
 the race from which we sprang. So much for the national 
 virtues, the English home, which we have fondly hoped to 
 copy ! 
 
 It is disheartening to turn from the grand sketch drawn 
 by Emerson to the testimony of the ^^ Saturday Review." 
 The times have changed, the fashions are altered, the court 
 is debased, and the fireside profaned. 
 
 We can and must believe that the ideas of mankind are 
 undergoing great changes ; that the incandescence of Ju- 
 piter, the fluidity of Saturn, the atmospheric disturbance 
 of Mars, and the tremendous performances in the sun, our 
 own luminary, are being paraphrased in the minds of men on 
 this little orb. We see such a modern violation of decency 
 as that the late Czar of Russia married four months after 
 his wife's death, and yet neither Church nor State objected ; 
 we see the growth of socialism and communism in Ger- 
 many, indifference and atheism in France, confusion and 
 disintegration, materialism and infidelity in America. We 
 can not shut our eyes to these facts ; they are what we 
 have to contend with. If in our old-fashioned way we still 
 have the idea of an old-fashioned home ; if we believe that 
 fashion perishes, but that the fireside endures for qyqv ; if 
 we hope to make the amenities of home fresh and growing 
 plants which no blight of popular whirlwind can blast, the 
 one unfading and immortal instinct ; if we believe in this, 
 and shall try to preserve it intact, we must bravely consider 
 the force of our enemy and look to our guns, not underrat- 
 ing the strength of the opposing force, nor mildly believing 
 in our own, but praying for guidance in the right way. 
 
VI. 
 THE MODEL GIRL. 
 
 '*! AM SO glad I have no daughters," said a leader of 
 society ; ^^for what should I do with them ? I should not 
 wish to have them i)eculiar girls, dressed differently from 
 their mates, or marked as either bookish girls, or prudish 
 girls, or non-dancing girls, or anything queer ; and yet I 
 could never permit them to go out on a coach, be out to 
 the small hours of the night with no chaperon but a 
 woman no older than themselves. I could not allow them 
 to dance with notorious drunkards, men of evil life, gam- 
 blers, and betting men ; I could not let them dress as many 
 girls do whom I know and like ; so I am sure it is fortunate 
 for me that I have no daughters. I could not see them 
 treat my friends as so many of my friends' daughters treat 
 me — as if I were the scum of the universe. I am glad I 
 have no daughters ; for a modern daughter Avould kill me." 
 
 Perhaps this lady but elaborated the troublesome prob- 
 lem which has tried the intellects of all observant women 
 — how to make the proper medium girl; not the ^^fast" 
 girl; still again, not the *^ slow" dowdy girl; not the ex- 
 ceptional girl, but the girl who shall be at once good and 
 successful — that is the question ? 
 
 The amenities of home, the culture of the fireside, the 
 mingled duty and pleasure which come with a life which 
 has already its duties before its pleasures — this would seem 
 to make the model girl. The care and interest in the 
 
40 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 younger sisters and brothers ; a comprehension and a sym- 
 pathy with her mother's trials; a devotion to her hard-, 
 worked father ; a desire to spare him one burden more, to 
 learn the music he loves, to play to him of an evening ; to 
 be not only the admired belle of the ballroom, but also the 
 dearest treasure of home ; to help along the boys with their 
 lessons, to enter into those trials of which they "will not 
 speak ; to take the fractious baby from the patient or im- 
 patient nurse's arms, and to toss it in her own strong young 
 hands and smile upon it with her own pearly teeth and red 
 lips ; to take what comes to her of gayety and society as 
 an outside thing, not as the whole of life ; to be not heart- 
 broken if one invitation fail, or if one dress is unbecoming ; 
 to bear the slight of no partner for the German with a 
 smiling indifference ; to be cheerful and watchful ; to be 
 fashionable enough, but neither fast nor furious ; to be cul- 
 tivated, and not a blue-stocking ; to be artistic, but not 
 eccentric or slovenly ; to be a lovely woman whom men 
 love, and yet neither coquette nor flirt — such would seem 
 to be the model girl. 
 
 And it is home and its amenities which must make her. 
 School can not do it ; society can not and will not do it ; 
 books will not do it, although they will help. 
 
 And here we have much to say on the books which 
 should surround a girl. We must seek and watch and try 
 to find the best books for our girls. But we can no more 
 prevent a bad French novel from falling into their hands 
 than we can prevent the ivy which may poison them from 
 springing up in the hedge. The best advice we can give, is 
 to let a girl read as she pleases in a well-selected library ; 
 often reading with her, recommending certain books, and 
 forming her taste as much as possible ; then leaving her to 
 herself, to pick out the books she likes. Nothing will be 
 so sure to give a girl a desire to read a book as to forbid it, 
 and we are now so fortunate in the crowd of really good 
 
TEE MODEL GIRL. 41 
 
 novels and most unexceptional magazines which lie on 
 our tables that we are almost sure that her choice will be a 
 good one ; for she can find so much more good than bad. 
 
 It is unwise to forbid girls to read novels. They are to- 
 day the best reading. Fiction, too, is natural to the youth- 
 ful mind. It is absurd to suppose that Heaven gave us our 
 imagination and rosy dreams for nothing. They are the 
 drapery of fact, and are intended to soften for us the dreary 
 outlines of duty. No girl was ever injured, if she were 
 worth saving, by a little novel-reading. Indeed, the most 
 ethical writers of the day have learned that, if a fact is 
 worth knowing, it had better be conveyed in the agreeable 
 form of a fiction. What girl would ever learn so much of 
 Florentine history in any other way as she learns by read- 
 ing ^^Romola"? What better picture of the picturesque 
 past than *^The Last Days of Pompeii" ? Walter Scott's 
 novels are the veriest mine of English and Scotch history ; 
 and we might go on indefinitely. 
 
 As for studies for girls, it is always best to teach them 
 Latin, as a solid foundation for the modern languages, if for 
 nothing else ; as much arithmetic as they can stand ; and 
 then go on to the higher education and the culture which 
 their mature minds demand, if they desire it and are equal 
 to it. 
 
 But no mother should either compel or allow her daugh- 
 ter to study to the detriment of her health. The moment 
 a girl's body begins to suffer, then her mind must be left 
 free from intellectual labor. With some women brain- work 
 is impossible. It produces all sorts of diseases, and makes 
 them at once a nervous wreck. With other women intel- 
 lectual labor is a necessity. It is like exercise of the limbs. 
 It makes them grow strong and rosy. No woman who 
 can study and write, and at the same time eat and sleep, 
 preserve her complexion and her temper, need be afraid of 
 intellectual labor. But a mother must watch her young 
 
42 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 student closely, else in the ardor of emulation amid the ex- 
 citements of school she may break down, and her health 
 leave her in an hour. It is the inexperienced girl who 
 ruins her health by intellectual labor. 
 
 To many a woman intellectual labor is, however, a neces- 
 sity. It carries off nervousness ; it is a delightful retreat 
 from disappointment ; it is a perfect armor against enniii. 
 What the convent life is to the devotee, what the fashion- 
 able arena is to the belle, what the inner science of j)oli- 
 tics is to the European Avomen of ambition, literary work 
 is to certain intellectual women. So a mother need not 
 fear to encourage her daughter in it, if she sees the strong 
 growing taste, and finds that her health will bear it. 
 
 But we fear tliat certain fashionable schools have ruined 
 the health of many a girl, particularly those where the 
 rooms are situated at the top of a four-story building, as 
 they generally are. A poor, panting, weary girl mounts 
 these cruel steps to begin the incomprehensibly difficult 
 service of a modern school. ^' Why do you never go out at 
 recess ? " said a teacher to one of her pupils. " Because it 
 hurts my heart so much to come up the stairs," said the 
 poor girl. "Oh ! but you shoiild take exercise," said the 
 teacher ; "look at Louisa's color ! " 
 
 That teacher knew as much of pathology as she did of 
 Hottentot ; and the pupil thus advised lies to-day a hope- 
 less invalid on her bed. 
 
vir. 
 THE MANNERS OF YOUNG MEN, 
 
 But, if the amenities of home are thus hopefully to 
 direct our daughters in the right way, what will they do for 
 our sons ? 
 
 Of one thing we may be certain, there is no royal road 
 by which we can make '^good young men." The age is a 
 dissolute one. The story of temptation and indulgence is 
 not new or finished. The worst of it is that women feed 
 and tempi' the indulgence of the age. AVomen permit a 
 lack of respect. Even young men who have been well 
 brought up by their mothers become careless when associ- 
 ating with girls who assume the manners and customs of 
 young men. And when it is added that some women in 
 good society hold lax ideas, talk in double entendre, and 
 encourage instead of repressing license, how can young men 
 but be demoralized ? 
 
 If women show disapproval of coarse ideas and offensive 
 habits, men drop those ideas and habits. A woman is 
 treated by men exactly as she elects to be treated. There 
 is a growing social blot in our society. It is the compla- 
 cency with which women bear contemptuous treatment 
 from men. It is the low order at which they rate them- 
 selves, the rowdiness of their own conduct, the forgiveness 
 on the part of women of all masculine sins of omission, that 
 injures men's manners irretrievably. 
 
 Fast men and women, untrained boys and girls, people 
 without culture, are doing much to injure American so- 
 
44 AMENITIES OF ROME. 
 
 ciety. They are injuring the immense social force of good 
 manners. Women should remember this part of their duty. 
 Men will not be chivalrous or deferential unless women 
 wish them to be. 
 
 The amenities of home are everything to a boy. With- 
 out them very few men can grow to be gentlemen. A 
 man's religion is learned at his mother's knee ; and often 
 that powerful recollection is all that he cares for on a sub- 
 ject which it is daily becoming more and more of a fashion 
 for men to ignore. His politeness and deference are cer- 
 tainly learned there, if anywhere. A mother must remem- 
 ber that all hints which she gives her son, as to a graceful 
 and gentlemanly bearing, are so many powerful aids to his 
 advancement in the world. A clergyman who did not ap- 
 prove of dancing still sent his son to dancing-school, be- 
 cause, as he said, he wished "him to learn to enter a draw- 
 ing-room without stumbling over the piano." 
 
 The education of the body is a very important thing. 
 The joints of some poor boys are either too loosely or too 
 tightly hung, and they find it difficult to either enter or 
 leave a room gracefully. " Don't you know how hard it is 
 for some people to get out of a room after their visit is 
 really over ? One would think they had been built in your 
 parlor or study, and were waiting to be launched," says 
 Dr. Holmes. This is so true that one almost may suggest 
 that it be a part of education to teach a boy how to go away. 
 The " business of salutation " and leave-taking is really an 
 important part of education. 
 
 One great argument for a military exercise is that it 
 teaches the stooping to stand up, the lagging to walk, the 
 awkward to be graceful, the shambling to step accurately. 
 Lord Macaulay in his old age wished that he had had a 
 military training, as he *' never had known which foot to 
 start with." 
 
 There are some persons born into the world graceful. 
 
TEE MANNERS OF YOUNG MEN. 45 
 
 whose bodies always obey the brain. There are far more 
 who have no such physical command. To those who have 
 it not, it must be taught. The amenities of home should 
 begin with the morning salutation, a graceful bow from the 
 boy to his mother, as he comes into breakfast. 
 
 And table manners, what a large part they play in the 
 amenities of home ! A mother should teach her boy to 
 avoid both greediness and indecision at table. He should 
 be taught to choose what he wants at once, and to eat 
 quietly, without unnecessary mumbling noise. Unless she 
 teaches him such care early, he will hiss at his soup through 
 life. She must teach him to hold his fork in his right 
 hand, and to eat with it, and to use his napkin properly. 
 If Dr. Johnson had been taught these accomplishments 
 early, it w^ould have been more agreeable for Mrs. Thrale. 
 Teach j'Our boy the grace of calmness. Let the etiquette 
 of the well-governed, well-ordered table be so familiar to 
 him that he will not be flustered if he upsets a wine-glass, 
 or utterly discomposed if a sneeze or a choking fit require 
 his sudden retreat behind his napkin, when, after he leaves 
 you, he essays to dine abroad. 
 
 Life in America is in a great hurry, and the breakfast 
 before school or business can not be in most families the 
 scene of much instruction. We are accused by foreigners 
 of bolting our food, and we are supposed to be dyspeptic 
 in. consequence. It is no doubt true that we do eat too 
 fast and too much. Seneca tells us that ^' our appetite is 
 dismissed with small payment, if we only give it what we 
 owe it," and not what an ungoverned appetite craves. It 
 is a debt which we should pay slowly, and by installments. 
 But, if breakfast is hurried, dinner can be quiet and well 
 ordered, be it ornate or simple. 
 
 Nothing is better for the practice of the amenities of 
 home than a rigorous determination to dress for dinner. 
 This does not mean that we should be expensively or shovv- 
 
46 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 ily dressed, but that every member of the family should 
 appear clean and brushed, and with some change of gar- 
 ment. A few minutes in the dressing-room is not too 
 much of a tax to even the busiest man, and he comes down 
 much refreshed to his meal. 
 
 A lady hardly needs any urging on this point ; but, if 
 any one does need urging, it is certainly worth mentioning. 
 
 Several years ago a growing family of boys and girls 
 were taken by their parents, who had experienced a reverse 
 of fortune, to the neighborhood of the oil-wells to live. It 
 was about the time they were growing up, and their mother 
 was in despair as she thought of the lost opportunities of 
 her children. Nothing about them but ignorance. No 
 prospect, no schools, no anything. But in the depth of her 
 love she found inspiration. 
 
 Out of the wreck of her fortunes she had saved enough 
 to furnish parlor and dining-room prettily, and to buy a few 
 handsome lamps. Books were there in plenty, for old books 
 sell for very little ; so she had been able to save that im- 
 portant factor of civilization. 
 
 Every evening her lamps were lighted and her dinner 
 spread as if for a feast ; and every member of the family 
 was made to come in as neatly dressed as if it were a party. 
 The father and mother dressed carefully, and the evening 
 was enlivened by music and reading. 
 
 She attended to their education herself, although not 
 fitted for it by her own training. She did as well as she 
 could. She taught them to bow and to courtesy, to dance, 
 to draw, to paint, to play and sing ; that is, she started 
 them in all these accomplishments. In five years, when 
 better fortunes brought them to the city again, they were as 
 well-bred as their city cousins, and all her friends ap- 
 plauded her spirit. This was done, too, with only the as- 
 sistance of one servant, and sometimes with not even that. 
 
 It required enormous courage, persistence, and belief in 
 
THE MANNERS OF YOUNG MEN. 47 
 
 the amenities of home. How many women, under such 
 doleful circumstances, would have sunk into slovenliness 
 and despair, and have allowed their flock to run wild, like 
 the neighboring turkeys ! 
 
 There is great hope for country children who are sur- 
 rounded by a certain prosperity and agreeable surroundings. 
 They see more of their parents than city children can; and 
 perhaps the ideal home is always in the country. Those 
 small but cultivated New England villages, those inland 
 cities, those rural neighborhoods, where nature helps the 
 mother, where the natural companionship of animals is pos- 
 sible for the boys, and the pony comes to the door for the 
 girls ; where water is near for boating and fishing, and in 
 winter for the dear delights of skating — such is the beautiful 
 home around which the memory will for ever cling. The 
 ideal man can be reared there, one would think — that ideal 
 man whom Richter delighted to depict, one whose loving 
 heart is the beginning of knowledge. 
 
 We could paint the proper place for the ideal man to be 
 born in, if, alas ! for all our theories, he did not occasionally 
 spring out of the slums, ascend from the lowest deeps, and 
 confute all our theories by being nature's best gem, without 
 ancestry, without home, without help, without culture. 
 
 The education of boys in cities is beset with difficulties; 
 for the fashionable education may lead to self-sufficiency 
 and conceit, with a disdain of the solid virtues ; or it may 
 lead to effeminacy and foppishness — the worst faults of an 
 American. These two last faults are, however, not fashion- 
 able or common faults in our day. There is a sense of su- 
 periority engendered in the " smart young man," so called, 
 which is very offensive. All snobs are detestable ; the 
 American snob is preeminently detestable. 
 
 A young man of fashion in New York is apt to get 
 him a habitual sneer, which is not becoming, and to assume 
 an air of patronage, which is foolish. He has a love for dis- 
 
48 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 cussing evil things, wliicli has a very poor effect on his 
 mind ; he has no true ideas of courtesy or good-breeding ; 
 he is thoroughly selfish, and grows more and more debased 
 in his pleasures, as self-indulgence becomes the law of his 
 life. 
 
 His outward varnish of manner is so thin that it does 
 not disguise his inner worthlessness. It is like that varnish 
 which discloses the true grain of the wood. Some people 
 of showy manners are thoroughly ill bred at heart. None 
 of these men have the tradition of fine manners, that old- 
 world breeding of which we have spoken. They would be 
 then able to cover up their poverty ; but they have not 
 quite enough for that ; and they truly believe — these mis- 
 guided youths — that a rich father, a fashionable mother, 
 an air of ineffable conceit, will carry them through the 
 world. It is astonishingly true that it goes a great way, 
 but not the whole way. 
 
 No youth, bred in a thoroughly virtuous and respectable 
 family, grows up to be very much of a snob, let us hope. 
 Alas ! he may become a drunkard, a gambler, a failure. 
 And then we come up standing against that great cruel 
 stone wall, that unanswered question, *^Why have I 
 wrought and prayed to no purpose ? " And who shall 
 answer us ? 
 
 It is the one who sins least who is found out, and who 
 gets the most punishmenb. 
 
 There is a pathetic goodness about some great sinners 
 which they never lose. TVe love the poor fallen one whom 
 we try to save. Never are the amenities of home more pre- 
 cious, more sacred, more touching, than when they try to 
 help the faltering, stumbling footstep ; to hide the disgrace, 
 to shelter the guilty, to ignore, if possible, the failing which 
 easily besets the prodigal son ; to welcome him back when 
 society has discarded him ; to be patient with his pettish- 
 ness, and to cover his faults with the mantle of forgiveness : 
 
THE MANNERS OF YOUNG MEN 49 
 
 all these are too tragic, too noble, too sacred for us to dilate 
 upon. They are the amenities of heaven. 
 
 Society makes no explanations and asks none, else we 
 might ask why some men and women are tolerated, and why 
 others are cast out ? Why some young man who had once 
 forgotten himself after dinner is held up to scorn, and why 
 another is forgiven even through the worst scandal ? Why 
 is injustice ever done ? 
 
 Many a young man, having experienced injustice at the 
 hands of society, goes off and deliberately commits moral 
 suicide. The^onduct of society is profoundly illogical, and 
 we can not reform it. 
 
VIII. 
 
 CONSIDERATION FOR EACH OTHER. 
 
 Too great care can not be taken in the family circle of 
 each other's feelings. Never attack your brother's friend. 
 Remember that if we are at all individual we can not like 
 the same people, see the same resemblances, or enjoy always 
 the same book. Temperaments differ. One feels a draught 
 and wishes the window shut while another is stifling with 
 heat. "Were we among strangers, we should simply bear 
 with the draught or the heat without speaking. At home 
 it grows into a quarrel. 
 
 " I am so glad Louisa has gone away, for now I can shut 
 the window," said a sister once, who found it so impossible 
 to live with her family that on coming into her property 
 she very wisely took a house by herself. Perhaps they could 
 not live in the same atmosphere. 
 
 Great care is necessary in remarks about looks. Never 
 tell people that they are looking ill. If they are sensitive, 
 as most people are about their health, the information that 
 they look ill will make them worse. The questions and the 
 searching glance of a kind mother will have to be borne, 
 for she is the natural custodian of the health of her family ; 
 but even that annoys most people. A due regard for the 
 feelings of her family will teach her, in nine cases out of 
 ten, to hide the anxiety she may feel. 
 
 Cheerfulness is very necessary in the family. If a per- 
 son is really ill, we shall find it out soon enough. If he 
 desires sympathy he will come for it, but if he is really 
 
CONSIDEEATTON FOR EACH OTHER, 51 
 
 ailing, and desirous of concealing it, we should respect his 
 secret, nor strive to woi-m it from him. Many people are 
 made ill by being told that they are ill. An invalid once 
 said that the sunshine had all been taken out of his morning 
 walk by the lugubrious looks of a friend, who shook his 
 head, and said, '^ My dear fellow, I must confess that you 
 are looking very badly." But there is a class whom Moliere 
 has painted in the ^'' Malade Imaginaire," who desire noth- 
 ing more than to be considered ill, who are always looking 
 for sympathy and flattery. 
 
 The amenities of home should surround the real invalid 
 with flowers, sunshine, agreeable company, if it can be 
 borne, and variety. It is often that the sick-room of some 
 confirmed sufferer is the most cheerful room in the house. 
 If there is a pretty new thing in the possession of any mem- 
 ber of the family, it finds its way to patient Helen's couch. 
 If there is a new book, it goes to her to have its leaves cut ; 
 and if any one has a song or story, how quickly it ascends 
 to that person 1 *^ I never knew how happy a home I pos- 
 sessed until I broke my leg," said a young man, to whom 
 a broken leg was a fearful interruption to business and 
 l^leasure. 
 
 Remember always to give a sick person what variety you 
 can command. 
 
 Some sufferers from fever require to have the pictures 
 changed on the wall. Some invalids, who are prisoners for 
 years in a room, are better for a new wall-paper or a new 
 carpet. Nothing can be so grateful as a country prospect 
 of wood and water, hill and dale, the sky at morning and 
 at evening. The city is a hard place for the chronic inva- 
 lid who can see nothing but the opposite row of houses. 
 However, the scene may be varied by the presence of birds 
 and flowers ; and a well-bred, favorite dog, particularly a 
 big one, is a great help. 
 
 The amenities of the sicS-room and the proper manage- 
 
52 AMEMTIES OF HOME. 
 
 ment of it are subjects which have, however, been so well 
 treated by Florence Nightingale, and others who have made 
 them a study, that they seem hardly a part of our little 
 treatise. 
 
 The mistress of a house should never reprove her ser- 
 vants at table or before her assembled family. It destroys 
 many a meal at home, and drives young men to their club, 
 if their mother insists upon using her voice loudly in re- 
 proving a refractory servant. No doubt she is often 
 tempted ; no doubt it is very necessary ; no doubt it re- 
 quires an angelic patience to refrain. But she should re- 
 frain ; she should be angelic. Let the man drop the plates ; 
 she must be ^' mistress of herself, though China fall ! " 
 Let the maid come in with bare, red arms and a frowsy cap ; 
 the mistress must bear it all in silence, nor seem to see it, 
 however dreadful it may be. Then let her descend upon 
 the faulty one, and, in the retirement of the front base- 
 ment, have it out with her. 
 
 Some women have a gift at training "servants which is 
 like the talent which generals have in handling an army. 
 They can, by their own personal magnetism, make a ser- 
 vant refrain from clattering plates. Others have no such 
 gift. . They are from first to last the slaves of their ser- 
 vants, afraid of them, and unable to cope with them. 
 " Oh ! that I could make a request which is a command as 
 you do," said one of the inefficient to the efficient. 
 
 It is, perhaps, a talent which can not be learned ; cer- 
 tainly, after many failures, we do not wonder that the 
 women who can not manage servants give up housekeeping, 
 and go to the hotels and boarding-houses. A model hostess 
 is said to be one who has a knowledge of the world that 
 nothing can impair, a calmness of temper which nothing 
 can disturb, and a kindness of disposition which can never 
 be exhausted. Now, that is rather an unusual character. 
 A hostess should certainly have self-control, and should not 
 
CONSIDERATION FOR EACH OTHER. 53 
 
 reprove her servants before company. She should have 
 tact, good-breeding, and self-possession. Even then she 
 may not have the talent to create good service out of the 
 raw material — the clay which Ireland sends to her. She can 
 only suffer and be silent. 
 
 We have spoken of the impropriety of attacking our 
 brother's friends. If we can not like them, we can refrain 
 from knowing them intimately ; but let us always also re- 
 frain from speaking ill, or " making fun " of those persons 
 who are liked by other members of the family. There are 
 some families — not the happiest ones — where this is done 
 constantly. If Edmund likes Jack, who is peculiar, Wil- 
 liam and Susan make all manner of ^^game " of Jack, and he 
 is thus excluded from the house. Edmund hesitates to invite 
 him, as he knows that he will be pained by these ill-natured 
 comments. Certain families have a sort of acrid disagreea- 
 bility, which they call wit, which overflows in this wa}^ 
 and which makes home anything but a happy place. 
 
 Young people are little aware how badly they appear as 
 satirists. They do not know enough, as a general thing, 
 to satirize wisely. It takes a great and a learned person to 
 do that. Young persons should be optimists, and should 
 admire rather than condemn. They should learn that cul- 
 tivated persons rarely have to resort to such weapons as 
 coarse censure and crude ridicule. And, even if in the 
 height of good spirits and youthful fun, they feel like ridi- 
 culing the friend whom their brother has chosen, let them 
 make the case their own, and try to imagine how they 
 would like to hear their own favorite friend abused. 
 
 Long arguments are very unwise, and almost always 
 lead to harsh, unpleasant feeling. If there is a difference 
 of religion in the family, it should never be spoken of at 
 table. Many a youthful convert to some other creed has 
 been driven from home by the thoughtless and unkind re- 
 marks of his family. The subject of religion should be 
 
64 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 rarely or never introduced between more than two talkers. 
 The expressions of even earnest believers are necessarily so 
 vague that the conversation can rarely do any good ; and it 
 is far wiser for the youth to go alone to the clergyman 
 whom he selects, or to talk to his father, mother, or chosen 
 friend on this most important of all subjects. Still better is 
 it to take prayerful counsel of his own heart. Never make 
 it dinner-table talk ; for it either becomes flij^pant and 
 irreverent, or it leads to violent quarrels and sometimes to 
 deadly hatreds. 
 
 A difference of political sentiment also is dangerous to 
 the amenities of home. Brothers had better not indulge 
 in much discussion in the family circle. They can not 
 feel as coolly toward each other as ordinary disputants — 
 that is impossible. They can only differ, and often quar- 
 rel. The few who, in the familiarity of home, can coolly 
 argue are indeed very few. 
 
 The wise and learned Phillips Brooks says truly, *^ Fa- 
 miliarity does not breed contempt except of contemptible 
 things or contemptible people." This is very true. But 
 we must remember that familiarity does take off the outer 
 cuticle, and leave us very defenseless. We are not the 
 same strong-handed, steel-visaged pefsonages to our own 
 family that we are to the outer world. They know us too 
 well, and we know them too well. We are fighting with- 
 out gloves with our own people. The bitterness and hurt 
 of a family quarrel is a proverb. 
 
 Never interrupt each other. Let each speaker have his 
 five minutes, and say out his say. There are some people 
 so notoriously ill-bred in this way that they are nuisances 
 in their own houses. They talk on — on — on, and notice 
 the speech of others not a jot. Others interrupt when one 
 has begun a sentence, and haye no sort of regard for the 
 fact that even the lady of the house has been trying to 
 make a remark for some time. Hesitating, slow talkers 
 
CONSIDERATION FOR EACH OTHER. 55 
 
 are very apt to be- ruled out by fluent ones. Other peo- 
 ple have a deliberate intention of spoiling a story or an 
 epigram by sailing in across the bows of another ; and a 
 still more reprehensible class lead up the conversation to a 
 mot or an anecdote which they wish to tell. It is a great 
 sin against good-breeding to interrupt a person who is 
 making a remark or about to make one, or to speak before 
 he has quite finished. The slow talker usually has some- 
 thing very good to say, and the word which he is trying to 
 find is worth waiting for. The fast and flippant talker 
 sweeps all before him with his weak diaphanous discourse. 
 No one is much the wiser for his deluge of words ; the 
 better thought is, however, washed away, and the slow 
 talker is driven from the field. 
 
 Brilliant talkers have very great temptations in this 
 way. Not only is the thought pressing for utterance, and 
 the word dancing on the end of the tongue, but the talker 
 also knows that a laugh will follow and his mot will be 
 appreciated. There is no such immediate and dear ap- 
 plause as that which follows a ready talker, and no wonder 
 that he finds it hard to be a good listener. 
 
 However, to be a good listener is a most graceful gift — 
 particularly to a good talker. It is such an act of self- 
 sacrifice ! Those brilliant *^ flashes of silence " — how much 
 they cost the ready-witted talker ! Yet it is to him a 
 greater art than to talk well, for it calls on him to repress 
 his own seething speech, and to hear somebody say badly 
 what he would say so well. 
 
 The good listeners are very popular. They can, even 
 if they have nothing to say, still promote conversation ; 
 and a good listener who looks amused seems to carry on 
 the conversation. He knows the specialty of his friend, 
 and can wind him up and §et him going ; and if he is an 
 unselfish good listener, he will put in, here and there, the 
 necessary short speech which is just what the talker needed. 
 
56 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 Many families have wit and the ** give-and-take" of con- 
 versation, and so supplement each other admirably. Many 
 families of brothers and sisters keep the table in a roar by 
 their felicitous remarks, their happy quotations, and their 
 delicate and spicy remarks on current events. They agree 
 as well in conversation and are as harmonious as when they 
 are singing. But there are others where a disregard for the 
 rights of conversation spoils the amenities of the dinner- 
 table, and where one over-argumentative brother, or one 
 disputatious sister, or a father who overrides all his chil- 
 dren and talks while they are talking, or a mother who 
 has no talent for listening, will destroy the pleasure of the 
 table, of the evening fireside talk, and make home a place 
 to be deliberately avoided. 
 
 "I wish our home would barn up," said an unhappy 
 boy, who could not see any other way out of his domestic 
 misery, and who perhaps intended by the light of that cor- 
 rective fire to run away to parts unknown. 
 
IX. 
 
 THE TYRANT OF HOME. 
 
 A HAPPY home should be one in which there is no 
 despot. 
 
 AYe all know that a mother's will is sometimes so phe- 
 nomenally strong that she is little less than an eastern 
 satrap. We see it in the pale, repressed looks of her 
 maiden daughters who follow her about like shadows, 
 creatures who have never known what it is to have a 
 thought or a wish of their own, who are as mutilated in 
 their miserable bondage as is the Chinese foot in its artifi- 
 cial wrappings. 
 
 There are mothers — beings to whom God has permitted 
 the great blessing of children — who are Molochs in their 
 love of power. They do not wish their children to have an 
 individual existence, and the home of such women is a 
 most unhappy spot. They have great power of torture, 
 and they seem to like to exercise it. 
 
 There is a story on record of a mother who hated her 
 two elder daughters, and compelled them to eat in the 
 garret, to sleep in poorly furnished rooms. They were not 
 permitted to come to the family table. She allowed her 
 two younger children to eat with her, and treated them 
 well. AVhy the two elder women submitted, why they did 
 not take their leave, is not mentioned ; probably because 
 the shadow of that strong will pursued them. It had been 
 over them from childhood, and had paralyzed them. To 
 many women, family pride, a dread of publicity, a shame 
 
58 AMEN^ITIES OF HOME. 
 
 of revealing the skeleton in the closet, are all-powerful 
 reasons for submitting to a ruined life. Anything rather 
 than public exposure. 
 
 Other women, having a despot for a father, hesitate to 
 marry even when well advanced in life if he forbids. A 
 woman of forty is surely old enough to judge for herself as 
 to whether she should marry or not. But, if she has been 
 quelled, put down, governed to death, she does not dare to 
 assert herself. She has not determination of character 
 enough to go to church and marry the man of her choice. 
 She has still the fear hanging over her of the despot. 
 
 This is quite too great a respect for family authority. 
 We are by no means advising a revolt from home relations. 
 But, after twenty-five, a woman may reasonably take her 
 fate into her own hands and judge for herself. It is wrong 
 to allow our parents or our children to rule our own per- 
 sonal judgment in these cases. 
 
 The amenities of home can not be said to be many in 
 these houses of tyrants. No wonder that deception follows 
 the footsteps of such. No wonder that they are dogged 
 with the constant fear of a revolt. No wonder that tyrants 
 descend to the business of bribing servants ; that they dis- 
 trust the martyrs about them. No description of torture — 
 not the dropping of water on the head — can be equal to the 
 suffering of a son or daughter who has thus been tyran- 
 nized over. Happy is he who outlives it or gets away from 
 it. If he survive the torture, he can well afford to con- 
 gratulate himself on extraordinary self-possession and cour- 
 age. 
 
 ''To live happily it is an excellent maxim to take 
 things just as they are." Such a cause is politic, but it is 
 not always possible. It is not agreeable to a young woman 
 to see her hour of youth pass from her ; to see her friends 
 marry, become happy wives and mothers, and to know that 
 she can not follow in that natural course because a tyranni- 
 
- THE TYRANT OF HOME. 59 
 
 cal father or motlier happens to forbid. Weak minds, of 
 course, give up ; they conceive it most safe to regulate their 
 lives by the rules of others. There is an hour of great 
 tribulation and a life-long regret. They dread to be called 
 "original people." They think that the "original" shock 
 society, as if that were not the best thing which could hap- 
 pen to society sometimes. But it is in no one's power to 
 help such irresolute persons. They must help themselves 
 to a higher, better life. They should remember that free- 
 dom is a gift of God, one which none of us has a right to 
 do away with any more than he has a right to cut off a 
 right hand. And if the tyranny which would keep us from 
 an individual life comes from father, mother, brother, sis- 
 ter, we are to emancipate ourselves from it, else we are not 
 doing ourselves justice. A spirit which lives in an atmos- 
 phere of torpidity and dull obedience to unjust tyranny is 
 not living. " For to make children live only by the opin- 
 ions of others, to train them not to influence, but to submit 
 to the world, is to educate them to think that others can 
 live for them ; is to train them up to inward falseness ; is 
 to destroy all eternal distinctions between right and wrong; 
 is to reduce them to the dead level of uneducated unorigi- 
 nality, which is the most melancholy feature of the present 
 day." 
 
 The school of home is said to be the best school for 
 conquering self. It is to be hoped that no discipline of 
 home will be like pumice-stone, rubbing self down and out 
 so completely that there is no salient point, no surface, but 
 a dead level. 
 
 Tyrants make bad servants. Bad temper, injustice, and 
 tyranny find their complement in a service which is of the 
 eye rather than of the heart. Good servants, who compre- 
 hend their duties and who try to do them conscientiously, 
 should be let alone. Too much interference makes them 
 cross and petulant. It vulgarizes a mistress to bo constant- 
 
60 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 ly nagging her servants, and it lowers the tone of both to 
 be in a constant atmosphere of dispute and fault-finding. 
 Yet a tyrannical mistress will contrive to make her servants 
 miserable, and yet keep them in her slavery. For the strong 
 will tells here, as it does with her unhappy children. Ser- 
 vants like to be commanded. All ignorant natures desire 
 to follow a leader. But they will cheat her and plunder 
 her, when they would hesitate to do the slightest wrong to 
 a benignant mistress. 
 
 To be just to one's servants ; to treat them as if they 
 were of like clay as ourselves ; to respect their religion, 
 their hours of recreation ; to give them an occasional extra 
 holiday or an appropriate present ; to inquire for their 
 health ; to wish them good-morning and good-night ; to 
 have an eye to their welfare ; to help them properly to in- 
 vest their earnings ; to write their letters for them ; to teach 
 them, if they are young enough to learn, to write and read 
 — these are the duties and pleasures of a good mistress. 
 
 Misrepresentation of motives, suspicions, and unrequired 
 tasks, which servants soon see are given to them merely 
 to impose upon them, will spoil the best domestic. If an 
 honest servant is suspected of theft, it goes far toward 
 making him willing to steal. Servants are not very sensi- 
 tive, it is true ; their hard lives have trampled out that 
 flower. A woman who is not a tyrant will try to raise the 
 self-respect of her servant, so that she will feel judicious 
 praise or blame. Servants hate to be reproved in public. 
 It drives them either into impertinence or into a stolid in- 
 difference ; and mortification is often the parent of bitter 
 recrimination. 
 
 The home, therefore, over whose jurisdictions a tyrant 
 presides, may be said to be the most truly unhappy of 
 homes. The spendthrift father makes a most miserable 
 home, with his lack of prudence and foresight ; the drunk- 
 ard's home is not the abode of bliss ; the false and frivolous 
 
THE TYRANT OF HOME. 61 
 
 wife makes a miserable home for all connected with her. 
 But all of these miserable sinners have their hours of ten- 
 derness and good nature. Their children will remember, 
 with tearful gratitude, some hours of love and of happiness. 
 There was much to forgive, but there was reason for for- 
 giving. But the home of the tyrant is an eternal blight. 
 Like those sage plains of the West, where the skin dries and 
 the earth cracks and the nails break, and where no green 
 thing will flourish, where life seems almost impossible, 
 except in its lowest conditions, such is the home of the 
 tyrant and the despot. 
 
X. 
 
 THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn to one of the brightest chapters of 
 the amenities of home after leaving the tyrants in gloomy 
 solitude, and consider that pleasant episode of home life, 
 *^the first engagement." 
 
 When it is an arrangement which satisfies prudent 
 papa and mamma, this is the most delightful moment of 
 mature life. It makes one young again to see the happi- 
 ness of two young lovers. *^ All men love a lover." The 
 introduction of a new son or daughter — that deep feeling 
 of rest that our son or daughter is to have the anchorage of 
 marriage — these are delicious reflections. We forget our 
 trials, our cankering cares ; we forget that they, too, must 
 fight the same hard battle of life which we have got nearly 
 through, and we see only the blissful side of the picture. 
 If, however, we do not entirely approve, it is a great duty, 
 and one which we owe our children, to hide from them any 
 fancied antipathy to the chosen one whom we may not 
 wholly love. Given good principles and good education, 
 good health and a moderate certainty of a future living, 
 and no parent has a right, if his child is sincerely attached, 
 to find fault with his or her choice. 
 
 Of course, no mother ever saw any wife quite good 
 enough for her son ; no father imagines that the man can 
 be born who is worthy of his daughter. Sometimes, with- 
 out meaning it, this feeling will show itself ; but it had 
 much better be kept out of sight, if possible. 
 
THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT. 63 
 
 Either a family should take a girl wholly to their 
 hearts, and treat her as their own daughter, or they should 
 decidedly disapprove from the first. No mutilated cour- 
 tesy, no half-handed generosity, no carping criticism is just 
 or honorable. That their son loves her, wishes to make 
 her his wife, should be a very unanswerable argument for 
 her hearty adoption into the family. And with regard to 
 a daughter's husband the same, and even greater, respect 
 should be shown. The old reproach against mothers-in- 
 law now rather relegates itself to old comedy ; it is not 
 believed that they are always so detestable as the ** Cam- 
 paigner" in ^^ Pendennis." 
 
 Yet a mother-in-law should let her sons-in-law severe- 
 ly alone, nor dare, because she has a very near relation- 
 ship to him, to interfere in the household authority, or 
 to say disagreeable things about the education of the chil- 
 dren. 
 
 The young girl who enters a large family as the be- 
 trothed of one of the brothers has a very difficult role to 
 fill. Unless she is frank and sincere, unless she is very 
 engaging, she is apt to be disliked by some of them. Per- 
 haps the brother has been a great favorite, and some lov- 
 ing sister is jealous of her. Some brother, even, may feel 
 offended at having the affections of his most intimate friend 
 stolen away from him ; or the charms which have won the 
 lover may not be apparent to the rest of the family. 
 
 Now is the time for good-breeding. Now is the moment 
 for the amenities. Let the young people remember to treat 
 that young lady with peculiar courtesy, for she will never 
 forget their conduct at this period. She is to be their 
 sister for all time. If they treat her with respect and cor- 
 diality, ten to one she will be a good sister. But, if they 
 treat her with hatred, suspicion, and dislike, she will be 
 their enemy all her days — and very little blame to her if 
 she is. It is the cruelty of the red Indian to treat a new- 
 
64 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 comer, introduced under such tender circumstances, with 
 anything but kindness. 
 
 American marriages, being for the greater part purely 
 marriages of affection, ought all to be happy. That a great 
 majority of them are so we firmly believe. The world is, 
 however, not yet paradise, and there is an occasional fail- 
 ure. A man, even the most sagacious, does get taken in 
 occasionally, and a woman now and then makes a poor 
 choice. Then, when father and mother read Edmund's 
 unhappiness in his pale face and saddened brow, what are 
 they to do ? 
 
 Nothing. We must bear the sufferings of our children, 
 as we should do our own, silently, although they hurt us in- 
 finitely more than our own have done. And in that new 
 relation we must bring the most perfect breeding to our 
 aid, trying to make politeness take the part of love. How- 
 over much we may disapprove, we must bury the disaffec- 
 tion in our own breast, and not wash our linge sale in 
 public. 
 
 No one feels interested in our failures, in our quarrels, 
 in our diseases, or in our disappointments. We must 
 ** consume our own smoke." No one will care to hear that 
 we dislike our daughters-in-law or disapprove of our sons' 
 wives. The family record should be a sealed book, of which 
 the most prudent member keeps the key. We have no 
 chance, in these days of newspaper notoriety, to hide from 
 the world what we do ; but we have the power to keep our 
 thoughts to ourselves. Our births, deaths, engagements, 
 marriages, and visits to our friends are all public property, 
 but our opinions are still our own, unless we choose to tell 
 them. 
 
 We can not expect of our daughters-in-law and sons-in- 
 law that they will always be patient with us, nor can we 
 ask it. They may find our demands upon our children 
 exacting. They may find our ways old-fashioned and un- 
 
THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT. 65 
 
 congenial ; therefore it is a dangerous experiment to take 
 them home to live. Jane may want a fire in her bed- 
 room when her mother-in-law considers a fire unnecessary, 
 and damaging to the new carpet. A young woman, accus- 
 tomed to the lavish attendance of her own servants, may 
 enter a family where the service is limited, and her laces, 
 carelessly thrown into the wash, may be brought back by a 
 sad-looking mamma, who assures the extravagant daughter- 
 in-law that she keeps "no fine washer and ironer." 
 
 These pin-pricks and small worries are what make up 
 life. And in nine cases out of ten they so disturb the 
 harmony of daily life that the experiment of living to- 
 gether fails utterly. Who can say, with any certainty, 
 that any two tempers will agree ? Still less half a dozen 
 tempers. 
 
 The first year of married life is a very trying thing. No 
 two young people would ever wish to live it over again. 
 They have got to become accustomed to each other. They 
 must conquer self. They must begin to live dually. It is a 
 hard lesson to learn. " Far from wondering that marriage 
 is sometimes unhappy, I wonder always that any two 
 people can live together," said an English divine, who has 
 thoroughly understood human nature. 
 
 After the illusions of first love must come the sober 
 fact that all life is not to be passed in honeymoons ; that 
 we have married mortals, not demi-gods or demi-goddesses, 
 and that the future, however much it may be illuminated 
 by the light of a sincere affection, is to be a scene of per- 
 petual self-sacrifice. 
 
 The happiness of marriage depends upon the very 
 highest and most delicate of reserves ; of the most flattering 
 and careful speech ; of the best and most honorable per- 
 ception ; upon a kindness greater than that of a mother to 
 her child ; and upon a thousand physical causes. Nobility 
 of sentiment is born of love, and is the delightful accom- 
 
QQ AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 paniment of married love, even in the most low-born brute. 
 Even Bill Sykes had his moments of tenderness for the 
 poor wretch who loved him so well, and whom he mur- 
 dered. Women remember these traits, and forget the bru- 
 tality. The devotion of a woman to a drunkard is not 
 remarkable, for, of all men, drunkards are sure to have 
 sensibility. But in the every-day marriage, between two 
 well-behaved and well-intentioned persons, the danger of 
 losing that first aroma of devotion is very great, for the 
 cares of daily life are very desiltusionee (we have no English 
 for that) ; and unless people are desirous to keep the flame 
 alight it soon smolders and goes out. 
 
 So much for the happiest marriages. What, then, of 
 the unhappy ones ? Where tempers are wholly incompat- 
 ible, where tastes differ, where two beings find that they 
 have put their necks into a yoke which galls both ; when 
 we find that the companion of a lifetime is disagreeable 
 to every feeling and sense, that we can not treat each 
 other with justice, because all our worst antipathies are 
 unconsciously aroused by the being whom once we loved — 
 what then ? 
 
 If left alone, particularly if there are children, people 
 sometimes continue to *^ agree to disagree " very amiably ; 
 but if they are surrounded by their relatives — never. 
 
 What unhappy wife would not go at once to her father 
 and mother and complain ? 
 
 , How could they help sympathizing ? And then the 
 cord is broken. The moment the domestic question is car- 
 ried up to a higher court, the first judge retires, and will 
 have no more to do with the case. A man never forgives this 
 appeal. No wonder a man in such a case hates his mother- 
 in-law ; for, if he had been alone on a desert island with his 
 wife, they might have fought it out, kissed, and become 
 friends. 
 
 So there is great reason for not taking the young couple 
 
THE FIRST ENGAOEMENT. 67 
 
 home. If they quarrel, the partisanship of either side will 
 never be forgiven by the other side. Matrimonial quarrels, 
 therefore, to be curable must be confined to the high prin- 
 cipals. There are, of course, people in this Avorld great 
 and good enough to live with others, to ^^ive at home" ; 
 but they arc very few. 
 
XL 
 
 A PROFESSION FOR OUR SONS. 
 
 Chan^cellor Kent said, in his wise way, that the citi- 
 zen who did not give his son a profession or a trade was 
 wronging the state. Every one must have something to 
 do. The idle man is a dangerous man. It is a pity that 
 every boy can not learn a profession and a trade. In the 
 troublous times which we have just gone through, we have 
 seen how much better it was to be a shoemaker than to be 
 a lawyer. The professional men nearly starved. 
 
 Madame de Genlis said that she knew seventy trades, by 
 any one of which she could have earned a living. She 
 taught the sons of Philip ^galite to make shoes, pocket- 
 books, brooms, brushes, hats, coats, and all sorts of cabinet- 
 work. She taught them literature, science, and music ; 
 had them instructed in watch-making and clock-making, 
 and even in the arts of killing and cutting up a sheep. 
 They found many of these resources valuable in exile ; and 
 it is strange that it has not occurred to those who have boys 
 who are not princes to do the same. A boy could learn 
 to be a carpenter while preparing for college, and could 
 study his Latin, Greek, and mathematics with a better 
 brain for the exercise. 
 
 It is to be rSgretted that gentlemen's sons deem certain 
 trades beneath their notice. For all labor is honorable, and 
 all can not succeed as lawyers, doctors, clergymen, or mer- 
 chants. There is great need of the handicraft so honorably 
 
A PROFESSION FOR OUR SONS. 69 
 
 considered in the middle ages. Every gift bestowed upon 
 us by Providence, whether of mind or body, is a talent to be 
 grateful for. Arthur can write verses ; Jack can cut down a 
 tree ; Sam can reason ; Edmund can do a sum ; Peter can 
 measure and saw boards ; Henry can tame animals and 
 make all nature his tributary ; James likes to sit and work 
 at some thoughtful, sedentary task ; Horatio is speculative, 
 active, courageous — he aims at Wall Street. Alas ! they 
 all aim at Wall Street, that fairy street lined with gold. 
 They go there, most of them, to find only Peter Gold- 
 thwaite's '^treasure," if, indeed, they do not find something 
 worse. 
 
 In the forming of character, the father and mother 
 should try to make headway against this national mistake, 
 that to rush headlong into money-making is the end of 
 life. A boy should be taught to respect the day of small 
 things ; to work honestly for every dollar he gets ; and to let 
 that dollar represent something given back for the worth 
 of it. It would be a very good thing for all young Amer- 
 icans if there were a law that they should enter no profes- 
 sion or business until they had proved that they could earn 
 their living by their hands. 
 
 Casimir Perier said, when accused of being an aristo- 
 crat : *^ My only aristocracy is the superiority which indus- 
 try, frugality, perseverance, and intelligence will insure to 
 every man in a free state of society ; and I belong to those 
 privileged classes of society to which you may all belong in 
 3'our turn. Our wealth is our own ; we have gained it by 
 the sweat of our brows or by the labor of our minds. Our 
 position in society is not conferred upon us, but purchased 
 by ourselves with our own intellect, application, zeal and 
 knowledge, patience and industry. If j^ou remain inferior 
 to us, it is because you have not the talent, the industry, 
 the zeal or the sobriety, the patience or the application, 
 necessary to your advancement. You wish to become rich 
 
TO AMENITIES OF HOME, 
 
 as some do to become wise, but there is no royal road to 
 wealth any more than there is to knowledge." 
 
 These are sentences which should be engraved on the 
 walls of every college and schoolhouse. Young men should 
 learn to look to patient labor as their lot in life. The fev- 
 erish and sudden success of a few, wrecks a thousand yearly. 
 
 " There is Charley, who has made his pile in Wall Street 
 in six months. Why should I work all my life for what 
 he gains in half a year ? " asks visionary and lazy Fred, not 
 counting the thousand failures in Wall Street, including 
 failures to be honest. 
 
 There is, however, a growing taste for agriculture in 
 our country which is most hopeful. The earth owes us 
 all a living, and if we will 'fickle her with a hoe she will 
 laugh with a harvest." 
 
 ^here is now living in the State of New York a young 
 farmer who went from the ranks of a fashionable career 
 right into the fields. Inheriting a farm which was worth 
 nothing unless he worked it himself, he determined to study 
 scientific farming at an agricultural college in England, 
 and came home armed with useful knowledge and with 
 practical ideas. He had learned to be a very good black- 
 smith, carpenter, saddler, and butcher — for a farmer should 
 know how to mend his farm-wagon, stitch his harness, shoe 
 his horse, and kill his calves — according to the economical 
 English fashion. 
 
 .And he had great good luck, this young farmer, in that 
 he found a wife who, like himself, had been reared in ^'^our 
 best society," but who was willing to leave all for his sake, 
 and to learn to pickle and preserve, to bake and brew, to 
 attend to the dairy, and to get up at five o'clock in the 
 morning to give her working husband his breakfast, and he 
 learned that, 
 
 "He who by the plow would tlirive, 
 Must either hold himself or drive." 
 
A PROFESSION FOR OUR SONS. 71 
 
 So this jolly farmer is always at it, and drives his team 
 afield himself at daybreak. 
 
 The old farmers wonder, as they see this handsome young 
 fellow, beautifully dressed, on Sunday, driving his pretty 
 wife to church, that he can make more money than they 
 can. His butter is better, and brings more a pound ; his 
 wheat is more carefully harvested ; his breed of pigs is cele- 
 brated ; his chickens are wonderful — for the books tell him 
 the best to buy. He has learning and science to hitch to 
 his cart, and they ^'homeward from the field" bring him 
 twice the crop that ignorance and prejudice draw. 
 
 Above all, he is leading a happy, healthy, and independ- 
 ent life. To be sure, his hands are hard and somewhat less 
 white than they were. But polo and cricket would have 
 ruined his hands. His figure is erect, and his face is ruddy. 
 He has not lost his talent in the elegant drawing-room, but 
 can still dance the German to admiration. He is doing a 
 great work and setting a good example ; for he is, as we 
 Americans say, "making it pay." To be sure, he has a 
 great taste for a farmer's life. No one should go into it 
 who has not. But what a certainty it is ! Seed-time and 
 harvest never fail. Wall Street sometimes does. 
 
 It would seem, while there is so much to be done in 
 America with her railroads, oil-wells, mines, farms, and 
 wheat-fields, her numerous industries and requirements, 
 that no man need be poor. Our sons can find something 
 to do, something to turn a hand to. 
 
 The teaching of home should be in this particular age 
 of the world to inculcate "plain living and high think- 
 ing " in our sons. That is what they need to be great and 
 good men, and useful citizens. 
 
XII. 
 
 PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN^. 
 
 If the commercial distress wliicli visited this country 
 between the years of 1873 and 1879 had brought us no 
 other benefit, amid the vast deal of suffering and ruin 
 which occurred to a people who had been living too fast, it 
 did this immense good : it taught women that they could 
 work and could earn money. It has been no uncommon 
 thing for the wife and the sister to support the family dur- 
 ing those dreadful years, now happily past. 
 
 Men are broken and discouraged when the ordinary 
 business of their lives fails them. They have not the ver- 
 satility of women, they have not woman's hope. It prob- 
 ably seemed to many a ruined father that there was little 
 hope in the accomplishments of his daughter. She could 
 paint a plaque very prettily, perhaps write tolerable poetry ; 
 "but that would not pay the butcher." The fact remains 
 that it did pay the butcher. One delicate woman during 
 these dreadful years has supported seven men — seven dis- 
 couraged, ruined, idle men, and she has done it very well 
 too. 
 
 The Decorative Art Society could tell a very good story 
 of w^oman's work, and the sister societies for the aid of 
 women have a noble record on their books. Wood-carving, 
 embroidery of a very high class, drawing, painting, music- 
 teaching, authorship, engraving on wood and modeling, are 
 all now well and profitably done by women. To be report- 
 
PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEK Y3 
 
 ers for newspapers, law reporters in the courts, and even 
 lawyers and doctors are also added on. 
 
 The training-schools for nurses have opened a new and 
 beneficent field for the cultivated, conscientious girl, who 
 is willing to devote herself to the care of the sick. She can 
 now do her work under a certain direction and law and 
 authority which give it dignity. To be an artist, and a 
 successful one, is a career which is opening more and more 
 to women. To paint, to illustrate books, to give fresh 
 ideas to the world with her brush, is a noble career for any 
 young woman. It requires talent, patience, enormous in- 
 dustry, and some courage, to endure jealous criticism. 
 
 The quarrel in Edinburgh respecting the female doctors 
 and the opposition everywhere to the entrance of women 
 upon men's chosen fields are fresh enough in the memory 
 of our readers. We need not enter upon this subject here. 
 
 Women of heroic force have great difficulty in finding 
 their places in the world. They are too active, too full of 
 the unrest of genius, to be always happy at home ; the great 
 woman is, when young, like the ugly duckling. She does 
 not please her mother or gratify her sisters. She does not 
 like to go to parties — society bores her. She may not be 
 pretty ; if she is, she does not care for compliments. If a 
 great philanthropist, like Florence Nightingale or Sister 
 Dora, is being developed for the use of the world, ten to 
 one this particular bird is too large for the nest, and dis- 
 comfits all the rest. 
 
 A woman of literary gifts, like Miss Martineau, who is 
 being brought up to plain sewing, and who has to come to 
 her real work through much family strife and contention, 
 is no doubt very disagreeable and troublesome to those who 
 have no strivings, no immortal fire to take care of. Such 
 women generally leave a record of much suffering, of early 
 injustice, of the unkindness of relatives, behind them, and 
 claim that, had they been treated better and better under- 
 7 
 
74: AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 stood, they would have been finer characters and more use- 
 ful to their day and generation. 
 
 There is no doubt of the fact that a narrow-minded 
 mother has often ruined the development and the useful- 
 ness of her gifted daughter. She least of all comprehends 
 the child who, though her very own, has all the qualities 
 of another race. It once gave a very good mother the most 
 acute pain because her daughter threw an apple-paring 
 into the fire exactly like her aunt Clarissa. '^AVhat do 
 you want to do that for, exactly like your aunt ? " was the 
 angry question. Aunt Clarissa was the father's sister, and 
 particularly disagreeable to the mother. It was a perfectly 
 honest and irresistible disgust. We can imagine how much 
 more powerful it would be if carried beyond apple-parings. 
 
 A young artist in Paris, who made a good living for her 
 mother and sister, declared with tears that she had never 
 been forgiven by either of them for deserting her sewing- 
 machine for the palette, and it was evident that she was 
 not clear in her own mind as to whether she had not dis- 
 graced herself. 
 
 These are instances of narrowness happily conspicuous, 
 and we hope few. But should not parents deeply consider 
 them, and ask themselves if they have a right to interfere 
 with the chosen vocation of a daughter, even if it does 
 seem to them to be eccentric ? We know a mother, who 
 aimed at social distinction and a rich marriage for her 
 daughter, who was so disgusted with her for choosing to 
 become a doctor that she fell ill, and w^ould not allow her 
 to care for or nurse her. 
 
 " Perhaps you had better try homoeopathy, and take the 
 cause of your disease as your cure," said her family physi- 
 cian. 
 
 "No, never. I would rather die than be cured by 
 Helen," said the offended mother. 
 
 She lived to forgive Helen, who now supports her, and 
 
PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN. Y5 
 
 she is in excellent health and spirits at sixty-five. Probably 
 Helen therefore knew best what was good for her. 
 
 But it is an unlucky thing for the amenities of home 
 when tlie daughters are so strongly disposed to leave the 
 ordinary walks of every-day feminine duty. The happiest 
 women are those who can lead the ordinary life, be amused 
 by society, dress, and conventionalities, and who can be 
 early married to the man of their choice, and become in 
 their turn domestic women, good wives, and mothers. 
 There is no other work, no matter how distinguished, 
 which equals this. But, if this life does not come to a 
 woman, and certainly it does not to a very large number, 
 there can be no doubt of the propriety of a woman's finding 
 her own sphere, her own work, and her happiest and most 
 energetic usefulness. 
 
 Anything can be forgiven of a woman except a career 
 of vice or vanity, or the wretched numbness of inaction. 
 No woman should insult her Maker by supposing that he 
 made a mistake in making her. A morbid or a useless 
 woman was not contemplated in the great plan of the uni- 
 verse. She has always a sphere. If home is unhappy be- 
 yond her power of endurance, let her 
 
 " Go teach the orphan boy to read, 
 The orphan girl to sew." 
 
 Let her learn to cook, bake, brew ; let her adopt a pro- 
 fession — music, possibly — and work at it. Let her go into 
 a lady's school and teach. Let her keep a boarding-house, 
 paper walls, hang pictures, embroider, dust, sweep, become 
 the manager of a business, do anything but sit down and 
 mope and wait for something to turn up. Many a pair of 
 unhappy old maids are now dragging out a miserable exist- 
 ence in a second-class boarding-house, turning their poor 
 little bits of finery, who might, if they had been brave in 
 their youth, have won a large rei^crtoire of thought and a 
 
76 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 comfortable competency. But they preferred to keep alive 
 one little corner of pride, and that has been but a poor fire 
 to sit by to warm their thin hands — hands which should 
 not have been ashamed to work, hands which would have 
 been whiter for honest effort. 
 
 The prejudice against literary women has so much dis- 
 c.ppeared that it requires no word of encouragement now to 
 women to try literature as a means of getting a living. In- 
 deed, so many more try writing than have the gift for it 
 that it would perhaps be wise to recommend a great many 
 to try anything rather than that. 
 
 To write well must be in the first place a gift : all have 
 it not. To be sure, it also requires will, persistency, and 
 the most enormous industry. No one ever wrote well who 
 had not gone through many an hour of pain, disgust at the 
 work, and a crucial test of the hard labor that is to bring 
 from the brain its purest gold. But even the industrious 
 can not always write ; and if a woman does not write well 
 she generally writes very poorly. She can not do machine 
 work as well as a man can. Therefore, if she have no in- 
 spiration, she had better throw down the pen. 
 
 Women, by reason of their health, are sometimes de- 
 barred from taking up any very exacting out-of-door work. 
 This was, in the opinion of an Edinburgh surgeon (the par- 
 ticular enemy of Miss Jex Blake), an unanswerable argu- 
 ment against their becoming physicians and surgeons. The 
 fact remains that they have become both. Therefore, we 
 can never say what a woman can not do. 
 
 But we could hardly train our daughters to be car con- 
 ductors, soldiers, or poHce-officers, the three trades which 
 are always thrown in the face of woman suffragists. 
 
 It remains to be seen why they should not play in 
 orchestras, become jewelers and watch-makers, wood- 
 carvers, and internal decorators, that branch of household 
 art now so fashionable and so profitable. For, with sixty 
 
PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN. 77 
 
 thousand unmarried women over and above the male popu- 
 lation in Massachusetts alone, we have evidently got to do 
 something for them. 
 
 One energetic woman in France has made a large fort- 
 une by raising hens and chickens. Another in the West is 
 a good practical farmer, taking care of ten thousand acres, 
 and making money surely and rapidly. It will repay all 
 women to inquire what were Madame de Genlis's seventy 
 trades, and which one, or two, she will learn. 
 
 There is another reason for learning a trade or an ac- 
 complishment, and that is for the pleasure which it gives 
 to an otherwise idle lady. Many a woman, after her chil- 
 dren are married, finds herself with days to get rid of 
 which have no possible pleasure in them. Her occupation 
 is gone, and she needs the help of something to carry off 
 weary, unprofitable hours. She generally, in these days, 
 takes to paintmg plaques and plates, fans and reticules — 
 which is very good as long as it lasts. It does not last very 
 long to a woman of active mind. She needs to throw in 
 charities and outside action, to organize ncAV schemes, and 
 to help along church and school. To unmask abuses, to 
 do that work in a great city which otherwise goes undone ; 
 this is the part of a good woman's work which may amply 
 repay an hour's thought. 
 
 The scheme for Protestant sisterhoods, which is looked 
 upon with alarm by many most thoughtful people, as open- 
 ing a door for that purposeless conventual seclusion and 
 life of imprisonment and ritualistic mummery in which 
 we Protestants do not believe, has grown out of the neces- 
 sity which unmarried women feel for a vocation. 
 
 There can be no harm in the institution of Protestant 
 sisterhoods so long as the sisters take no positive vow. It 
 will not hurt women to enter a religious house, work under a 
 lady superior in instructing the ignorant, raising the fallen, 
 helping the poor, so long as they do not lock the door on 
 
78 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 themselves and give the key into another hand. There is 
 no one Avho can be trusted with the custody of our liberty 
 but ourselves. A clergyman may be a very good man, but 
 he is still simply a fallible man ; and he may mistake very 
 much his duty when a Protestant sister tells him that she 
 desires to leave her work if he tells her that she can not. 
 She may know very much l^etter than he. It is all very 
 well to bind one's self to a good work for a year or two years, 
 that there may be consistency in the enterprise ; but a 
 longer or a final term is not consistent with that freedom 
 which God has given us. 
 
XIII. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF AGED PEOPLE. 
 
 There is no geyire picture so ornamental to the fireside 
 as an old lady with gray curls. Home should always con- 
 tain a grandmother, old aunt, or some relative who has seen 
 the world/lived her life, and who is now waiting gently 
 for the news which came to Christiana in the *^ Pilgrim's 
 Progress," meantime taking a pleasant interest in the lit- 
 tle tragedy or comedy of every-day life, and being the par- 
 ticular providence of the younger children. Such an old 
 lady is as agreeable as she is ornamental. So important is 
 the respectability of a virtuous ancestor to the nouveau 
 riclie, that Dickens says, in his immortal way, of the Veneer- 
 ings, ** that, if they had wanted a grandfather, they would 
 have ordered him fresh from Fortnum's and Mason's. He 
 would have come round with the pickles." 
 
 A grandfather is a very useful article, whether to quote 
 from or to enjoy daily. An agreeable old man is the most 
 delightful acquisition to any society. It is, perhaps, one 
 reason why the English dinner-table is so preeminently 
 agreeable, that old men keep themselves so very fresh, 
 healthy, youthful in feeling, while they are, of course, full 
 of the results of experience. A man in England at sixty- 
 five has not allowed himself to grow careless of dress or ap- 
 pearance. He is not sunk in the apathy or preoccupation 
 of old age, even at eighty. To keep himself au courant 
 with the excitements of the hour has been his rule through 
 
80 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 life. We who live must live every hour. We must culti- 
 vate those who are younger as a weary traveler stoops to 
 drink of the fresh spring which bubbles up at his feet. " It 
 will not do for us to seal up in a bottle the wine which was 
 good when we were young, and drink only that ; we 
 must go ever to the fresher vineyards. It is not given to 
 us all to remember a kindly grandfather ; but, to those who 
 can do so, it is the most agreeable perhaps of childhood's 
 memories. 
 
 The lovely old lady is a great treasure in a household, 
 has often agreeable accomplishments in the way of needle- 
 work and knitting, has a perfect store of excellent recipes 
 for cakes and custards, and knows the most delightful old- 
 fashioned games of cards. She has manners, too, learned 
 in a better school than ours. She is stately, courteous, a 
 little formal. She makes a beautiful courtesy. She tells 
 us how she was taught to do *' laid work," to sew furs, to 
 conserve currants, to sit up and not touch the back of her 
 chair. Her figure shows that a good spine is the result 
 of her early training. She is the one who is never tired of 
 the society of the growing girls, and who has at twilight 
 the prettiest stories of the time when slie was a young lady 
 and -Grandpapa came a-courting. It seems, seen through 
 the tender light of tradition, as if those were more roman- 
 tic days than ours. Ko doubt she has treasures of old lace 
 and brocade, which come out for dolls' dresses and pin- 
 cushions. She is very apt at Christmas-tide to produce un- 
 expected treasures.^ To comfort and encourage the falter- 
 mg, fainting mother when the new cares of maternity seem 
 almost beyond her strength, who so invaluable as the old 
 lady ? To soothe the boys and girls when the business of 
 life has removed for a moment their immediate guardian, 
 who so nice as Grandmamma ? 
 
 For young fathers and mothers have their own lives to 
 live. They must be excused if they wish to go to dinners. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AGED PEOPLE. 81 
 
 and parties, and to Europe without the children. Indeed, 
 while the husband is making the fortune, and the wife is 
 keeping house, and living out the business of youth, it 
 sometimes seems a pity that the bearing of children should 
 be thrown in. An English economist gravely proposed that 
 children should be born to the old, who have gotten through 
 with wishing to live, and who would be very much amused 
 with the business of the nursery, all other business having 
 ceased to amuse them. 
 
 Young people have a deal else to amuse them, no doubt, 
 and a family of children often seems a great bother to 
 them ; but the fact remains that they are ordained to cope 
 with this particular business, and they alone have the 
 strength to bear with the ceaseless activity of childhood. 
 Children after a time fatigue the old. 
 
 The other side of the picture is this, also. Old people 
 are not always agreeable, particularly old men, in a house- 
 hold. Grandpapa may be very gouty and very cross, very 
 unreasonable in his requirements, and uncertain as to his 
 hours. He may rap an unwary urchin over the head before 
 he knows it with his cane, and come down severely on the 
 subject of the girls' new dresses. If Grandpapa holds the 
 purse-strings, he is a terrible power. It is not often, how- 
 ever, that rich old men are disobeyed or neglected. Human 
 selfishness is too wary. 
 
 Old men generally are not so agreeable in a household 
 as old women. They are caged lions, if disease has crip- 
 pled them ; they torment themselves and those with whom 
 they live ; they feel the deprivation of that power and that 
 importance which once made up their lives. They have 
 never, perhaps, cultivated the domestic virtues. 
 
 So much the better for the amenities of home if the 
 household bear all this with patience, and all try to re- 
 member all that Grandpapa did for them when he was 
 young and strong. No matter what are the disagreeable 
 
82 AMEmriES OF HOME. 
 
 traits of the old, we must bear them upon our young and 
 strong backs. It is one of the privileges of home that we 
 can do this duty, and help old age to bear its sorrows. How 
 manifold are those evils — the loss of sight, the loss of hear- 
 ing, the aggravation of the nerves, the rheumatic pains ! 
 
 Dr. Johnson, in the ** Rambler," says : *' A Greek epi- 
 grammatist, intending to show the miseries that attend the 
 last stage of man, imprecates upon those who are so foolish 
 as to wish for long life the calamity of continuing to grow 
 old from century to century. He thought that no adven- 
 titious or foreign pain was requisite, that decrepitude itself 
 was an epitome of whatever is dreadful, and nothing could 
 be added to the curse of age but that it should be extended 
 beyond its proper limits." 
 
 " It would be well," says Col ton, ^' if old age diminished 
 our perceptibilities to pain in the same proportion that it 
 does our sensibilities to pleasure, and, if life has been termed 
 a feast, those favored few are the most fortunate guests who 
 are not compelled to sit at the table when they can no 
 longer partake of the banquet. But the misfortune is that 
 body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to 
 die together. It is bad when the mind survives the body, 
 and worse still when the body survives the mind ; but when 
 both these survive our spirits, our hopes, and our health, 
 this is worst of all." 
 
 Many old people who come upon their middle-aged 
 children for support and consolation have reached the lat- 
 ter condition. And no doubt they are a very heavy burden. 
 Many an ill-tempered old person has ruined the life of a de- 
 voted son or daughter. But the duty remains. It is one 
 which must not be shirked, even if it descends to a grand- 
 daughter. Little Nell did her duty, and only her duty. 
 
 It has remained for Dickens to depict, as only he can, 
 the burden of unjust and wicked parents upon virtuous 
 children. Indeed, he has been blamed for grinding up his 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF AGED PEOPLE, 83 
 
 own father for paint, and therefrom constructing the char- 
 acters of Turveydrop, Mr. Dorrit, and Mr. Micawber. One 
 can but feel regret that a youth such as Dickens passed had 
 eradicated much that was delicate and desirable in the way 
 of reticence. Yet the world needed the lesson. There are 
 depths in the heart of man which can only be reached by 
 such revelations : and we can but hope that some thorough- 
 ly selfish and unworthy parents have read and profited by 
 these lessons ; that a Turveydrop may have seen himself, 
 and have ceased to live on his children ; that a Dorrit may 
 have been ashamed of his pretense and turgidity ; a Micaw- 
 ber, more lovable than the others, have been aroused from 
 his worthless dreams! 
 
 Severity and censoriousness in the old alienate youthful 
 affections, and the old should constantly bear in mind that, 
 if they would keep the affections of their descendants, they 
 must cultivate amiability. As Dr. Johnson says, to again 
 quote his wise words: '•'■ There are many who live merely to 
 hinder happiness, and whose descendants can only tell of 
 long life, that it produces suspicion, malignity, peevishness, 
 and persecution ; and yet even these tyrants can talk of 
 the ingratitude of the age, curse their heirs for impatience, 
 and wonder that young men can not take pleasure in their 
 father's company. 
 
 " He that would pass the latter part of life with honor 
 and decency must, when he is young, consider that he shall 
 one day be old, and remember, when he is old, that he has 
 once been young. In youth he must lay up knowledge for 
 his support when his powers of acting shall forsake him ; 
 and m age forbear to animadvert with vigor on faults which 
 experience only can correct." 
 
 Those who are endeavoring to make home happy, and 
 who are baffled by the peevishness of an old person, must 
 try to strengthen themselves in the good work by every ar- 
 gument in favor of old age, making every excuse for it ; 
 
84 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 and, if all other arguments fail, must constantly say to them- 
 selves, " I shall one day be old ; let me treat my aged rela- 
 tives as I hope that my children may treat me." 
 
 Home should indeed be a ^^ blessed provision " for the 
 aged. \Yhether they are those healthy, agreeable old people 
 who have laughed at time, those whose unique privilege it 
 has been to stand erect under the burden of eighty years, or 
 those whom time and circumstance have crippled and cast 
 down, home is their place, and it should not be in our hearts 
 to consider them as a burden. 
 
XIV. 
 
 THE CAPABILITIES OF HOME EDUCATIOK 
 
 " The methods of education should be such as to guide 
 and balance the tendencies of human nature, rather than to 
 subvert them." 
 
 Mothers must all agree that the best part of education 
 is that which children give themselves in a happy, healthy, 
 not too formal home. The education of a child is princi- 
 pally derived from its own observation of the actions, the 
 words, the looks, of those among whom it lives. The ob- 
 servation of children is keen and incessant. They are al- 
 ways drawing their own conclusions. These observations 
 and conclusions have a powerful influence in forming the 
 character of youth. What you tell them they are very apt 
 to receive with suspicion. Seeing is believing. 
 
 " How do you know that that is ^ ? " said a rather ir- 
 reverent pupil to his teacher. 
 
 " Why, because I was taught so ! " 
 
 " Well, who taught you ? " returned Johnny. 
 
 "My teacher, a very good old man," said the poor 
 schoolmistress, pointing to the first letter of the alphabet. 
 
 " Well, now, how do you know but that old man lied?" 
 returned the imperturbable John. 
 
 The teacher was nonplussed. At last she thought of a 
 happy way out of her difficulties. 
 
 "You watch the other boys, Johnny, and see if they 
 think it is A ; if they do not, you may believe that it is -5." 
 
86 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 The great letter proved to be A to John's satisfaction, 
 after he had taught himself that it was likely to be it. A 
 matter of self-acquisition, treasured up and reasoned upon, 
 with collateral testimony brought to bear, which grew 
 stronger as Johnny advanced in literature, made A to John- 
 ny a fact. It was no fiction of learning which his natural 
 enemies were forcing upon him ; but, his native shrewdness 
 having found them out to be correct on this one important 
 fact, he believed them in future, and accepted B and as 
 parts of a system, occult and difficult to remember, but 
 still as facts. 
 
 We must remember, when in the first youthful ardor of 
 our systems and schemes of education, that costly apparatus 
 and splendid cabinets have no power to make scholars. The 
 little scholar says to his teacher, " Will you tell me what 
 time it is ?" as he looks at the clock. *'No," she should 
 say ; " I want you to tell me what time it is." 
 
 In a half hour the most slow and unimpressionable boy 
 can learn to tell time, and so on. His books and teachers 
 must be lys helpers, but the work must be his. As Daniel 
 Webster said: *^A man is not educated until he has the 
 ability to summon in an emergency his mental powers in 
 vigorous exercise to effect its proposed object. It is not the 
 man who has read the most or seen the most who can do 
 this ; such a one is in danger of being borne down like a 
 beast of burden by an overloaded mass of other men's 
 thoughts. T^or is it the man who can boast merely of na- 
 tive vigor and capacity. The greatest of all warriors who 
 went to the siege of Troy had not the preeminence because 
 Nature had given him strength, and he carried the longest 
 bow, but because self -discipline had taught him how to 
 bend it." 
 
 It is this power of raising a boy's mind to the ability to 
 work for itself which is the highest achievement of educa- 
 tion, and mothers are sometimes inspired with it. 
 
THE CAPABILITIES OF HOME EDUCATION. 87 
 
 And, as curiosity is the first feeler which the youthful 
 brain puts out, the mother should be very patient in an- 
 swering questions. This is, perhaps, the hardest trial which 
 a mother has to meet. To answer the questions of a tireless 
 crowd of children is enough to drive a nervous woman in- 
 sane. But, as long as her strength lasts, she must try to do 
 it, and as long as she knows what to say. "When they begin 
 with those unanswerable questions upon theology which 
 they always ask, and which she can no more answer than 
 they can, then she must stop. 
 
 "Mamma! why did God make the devil if he didn't^ 
 want any evil in the world ? " 
 
 " I do not know, my dear ; you must ask your father," 
 has been said to be the most powerful lecture upon woman's 
 cunning and man's limitations which was ever preached. 
 
 Curiosity being once excited, the field is plowed, and 
 the seeds of learning can be dropped in. Unhappily for the 
 poor boy, he has got to learn many things by rote — the 
 multiplication table, the spelling-book, the Latin grammar; 
 he must be taught that dreary gi'ind which we cd^\ formula, 
 in order that he may have a mental tape-measure to go by 
 hereafter. 
 
 But just as little should be taught by rote as possible, 
 especially what the child does not understand. It cripples 
 the mind, while it helps the memory. Original thinkers 
 have never been able to learn much by rote. 
 
 We must remember that education is like the grafting 
 process, and there must be some affinity between the stock 
 and the graft if we wish to get good fruit. Even if it were 
 desirable, it is very poor work to try to obliterate natural 
 tendencies, and make the tree grow artificially. We want, 
 while we are grafting our young tree, and cutting off the 
 unnecessary shoots, to preserve the fine original flavor of 
 the fruit which God gave it, which we did not make, and 
 can only help it to mature and ripen ; fortunate if, in 
 
88 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 our blundering ignorance, we do not injure rather than 
 improve it. 
 
 We should teach our children to communicate to us 
 their thoughts and inclinations with perfect freedom, so 
 that we can guess what their minds are leading to. We 
 can thus help them on their favorite road toward any art or 
 science to which their talents tend. AVe have to contend 
 morally with the habitual reticence of childhood ; but intel- 
 lectually, if not repressed or frightened, childhood is frank. 
 
 In teaching anything, as little as possible should be 
 taught a child at once. No wise mother gives her child a 
 half-dozen dishes to eat at once. She respects his stomach. 
 Why not have the same regard for his brain ? 
 
 In this, we are making the mother the teacher. We are 
 speaking of the capabilities of home, which is to be opposed 
 to the very injudicious tendencies of the average school, 
 an institution in which most mothers who look back upon 
 ian extended experience usually unite in decrying. Even 
 Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, who was the model school-master, 
 says, *' A great school is very trying. It never can present 
 images o'f rest and peace ; and when the spring and activity 
 of youth are altogether unsanctified by anything pure and 
 elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is dizzy- 
 ing, and almost more morally distressing than the shouts 
 and gambols of a set of lunatics." 
 
 The trouble with many of our schools is simply this : 
 they are money-making institutions only. Hard teachers, 
 bad air, and the forcing system, so that the master may 
 have a showy examination, that is all. Oh ! what distorted 
 spines, what fevers, what curious diseases, what wrath, 
 what confusion, what despair, have not been born in a fash- 
 ionable school ! It is dreadful to think of the tasks which 
 are imposed. And yet it is not within the capabilities of 
 home to do without a school training, especially for boys. 
 They must go to encounter the hard lessons which are to 
 
THE CAPABILITIES OF HOME EDUCATION. 89 
 
 prepare them for life. To learn their kind, to get rid of 
 morbidity, school is nece.ssary. 
 
 It is fortunately within the capabilities of home to 
 smooth the path of the suffering boy or girl who has to know 
 everything. 
 
 "The school-boy knows the exact distance to an inch 
 from the moon to Uranus," says Dickens, who had the 
 liveliest horror of a school, and the most active sympathy 
 with school-boys. " The school-boy knows every conceivable 
 quotation from the Greek and Latin authors. The school- 
 boy is up at present, and has been these two years, in the 
 remotest corners of the maps of Russia and Turkey, previ- 
 ously to which display of his geographical accomplishments 
 he had been on the most intimate terms with the whole of 
 the gold regions of Australia. If there were a run against 
 the monetary system of this great country to-morrow, we 
 should find this prodigy of a school-boy down upon us witli 
 the deepest mystery of banking and the currency. " 
 
 It is this cramming system, this illy digested and cruel 
 quantity, which is killing our boys, disgusting them with 
 the word learning , and which turns our colleges into loung- 
 ing-places for the lazy, where clubs are formed, and where 
 a " dig " is looked down upon as a low fellow. It is against 
 this false system tliat all the powers of home should be 
 arrayed. 
 
 We fear that the teachers of girls are very seldom guided 
 by any definite principles in educating the feelings and the 
 intellect of their pupils. The power of self-control is not 
 sufficiently dwelt upon ; the power of reflection, of looking 
 inward, of gaining self-knowledge in its true sense, is left 
 to be the growth of chance. The purely intellectual fac- 
 ulty, the power of comprehension, instead of being con- 
 stantly employed upon objects within its grasp, is neglected 
 in order to overload the memory. Women should be taught 
 to think, to be logical, to bring themselves to reason where 
 
90 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 they only feel ; to study abstract justice (a quality woman 
 seldom if ever possesses) : it is a necessity. 
 
 Much may be said of the capabilities of home education 
 for a girl with governesses. We are not rich in that staple 
 English article ; but there are good governesses to be found. 
 
 It is a question, however, whether or no we do not de- 
 prive a girl of much that is afterward agreeable in her life 
 in not sending her to school. She ought to know other 
 girls, and to measure herself with them.. Youthful friend- 
 ships are the strongest; and we would not like to relin- 
 quish that bond. How much more of evil she will learn 
 than of good in a mixed boarding-school remains an unan- 
 swered question. Most people after a careful inquiry are 
 brave enough to send their daughters to a boarding-school ; 
 and there are some schools which are so admirable that 
 they can certainly do our daughters much more good than 
 harm. 
 
 The public school is no doubt a better place for the 
 acquirement of knowledge than the private school. It is 
 a Procrustean bed, but it certainly produces good scholars. 
 
XV. 
 
 THE UNHAPPY HOME. 
 
 Home has, as we have all seen, great capabilities for 
 being unhappy. Dissensions among its members, the bad 
 conduct of one reacting upon all ; the shame of a bad fa- 
 ther, the dread of a cruel one ; the incurable peevishness, 
 perhaps, of an illy disciplined mother ; the incompatibility 
 of temper, the suspicions and the quarrels which may arise 
 even among well-intentioned people, often make home a 
 wretched spot. Bad housekeeping, an irregular income, an 
 attempt to make a show beyond one's means, all these things 
 tend to make home unhappy. 
 
 There are, too, the pstites miseres. When one desires 
 a quiet house and another wishes a noisy one ; when one 
 is social and the other is a recluse ; when the religious sen- 
 timents differ as to the propriety of amusements ; when 
 one likes a game of cards and the other considers cards as a 
 wicked snare ; when the presence of a clergyman of a cer- 
 tain denomination is desired by one part of the family and 
 objected to by the other — all these things tend to make 
 home a very uncomfortable spot. If the husband is order- 
 ly and the wife is not ; if the wife is systematic and the 
 husband will not come to dinner punctually ; if, year after 
 year, the struggling people find themselves no better off, 
 losing ground all the time — then sorrow and trouble rise 
 above the petites miseres, and home is unhappy. 
 
 It is, perhaps, true that we get rid of all these cumula- 
 
92 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 tive miseries by breaking up the home which has become 
 freighted with dreadful memories of dismal days. If any- 
 thing can forgive people for breaking up what to all Anglo- 
 Saxons is a sacred inclosure — that of the homestead — this 
 perpetual misery of home is that palliating circumstance. 
 
 " Oh ! if 1 never could see again that old sofa where I 
 have been compelled to sit and hear the family quarrel/' 
 said a young girl, who bravely went off to act as a govern- 
 ess, '* I think I could fight better the battle of life." 
 
 ^' I closed the door of my house in Blank Street," said 
 the father of a family after a winter of great trouble, ^^and 
 locked it, feeling happy that I should never see that interior 
 again. It is one of the many advantages in hiring a house, 
 that you can leave it, and begin again, in a new spot, a 
 struggle with fate and fortune." 
 
 *'My father ruined the health and happiness of his 
 whole family," said the heir to a large estate, "by binding 
 us all to a great house which he had built, where we, our 
 wives and children, were to live with my mother. We were 
 all so unhappy, so discordant, and so miserable that, after 
 ten years, we declared that we would all go poor and beg- 
 ging through the world rather than live in that way any 
 longer. Our servants kept up a perpetual bickering, and 
 we were, if not quarreling ourselves, trying to settle their 
 fights." 
 
 No man's life is long enough for him to accept any un- 
 happiness which he can reasonably get rid of. We advise 
 every family who are thus unhappy at home to break up 
 home, if they can do so without violating any duty. It is 
 often better, for health, virtue, and the good of each mem- 
 ber, that a home which is so discordant should be broken up. 
 
 It is not always the worst people who quarrel, although 
 quarreling is not an amiable or lofty pursuit. It is not al- 
 ways the most honest or the best people who have the art 
 of living well together. 
 
THE UNHAPPY HOME, 93 
 
 A father who is procrastinating, who does not keep his 
 promises to children in the way of money, makes an un- 
 happy home. A mother who prefers her own ease to her 
 children's welfare, who has outside rather than inside tastes, 
 makes an unhappy home. Brothers who quarrel, sisters 
 who disagree, all make an unhappy home. 
 
 A father once radically injured the character of his son 
 for life by turning away a visitor whom his son had invited. 
 The boy never recovered from the mortification. 
 
 And 3"efc people such as these we have mentioned may all 
 be moral and church-going people, meaning in their heart 
 of hearts to do right. 
 
 Home is a place where we hide our griefs, our failings, 
 our shortcomings, and our particular secrets. Therefore it 
 can not but have a very wide capability for unhappiness. 
 
 An opium-eating mother once shed her baleful shadow 
 over a home, and left upon her daughters such a scorn of 
 the word that they would never live anywhere but at board- 
 ing-houses and hotels. **Do not talk to us of home," said 
 both in a voice. 
 
 '*I find that my wife and I are much fonder of each 
 other when we sit down every day with a dozen people than 
 when we sit drearily opposite alone," said a jolly husband, 
 who went through life very respectably and happily, al- 
 though he never had a home. Chacun a son gout I 
 
 That beautiful old English word, the "homestead," 
 thus being capable of expressing so much that is terrible, 
 we can not but acknowledge that there is a shadow to the 
 picture, and that to those who feel that home is neces- 
 sarily unhappy there is an excuse for leaving it. 
 
 There are some women who, with the best intentions, 
 can not keep house. There is a fine stone house near a cer- 
 tain rural city, which for years stood empty, while the 
 owners and their children lived at a poor and uncomfortable 
 inn. It was well furnished, salubrious, and handsome. 
 
94 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 There was plenty of money in the bank, yet this family 
 never lived at home. 
 
 '' What is the matter with your fine stone house, Mark- 
 ham ?" said a neighbor ; *^is it haunted ?" 
 
 *' No," said Markham ; '' but the truth is, my wife can 
 not keep house. She is a well-intentioned woman, an ami- 
 able woman, and an intelligent woman ; but the class of 
 faculties which belong to the ordering of dinner, the train- 
 ing or keeping of servants, she has not. Nor could she 
 happily exist with a housekeeper. I tried it three years. 
 I begged of her to let me keep house, but she could not con- 
 sent to that ; so, never having had breakfast until it was 
 dinner-time, or dinner until it was time to go to bed, I 
 gave it up, and we have lived at a tavern all our lives." 
 
 We may talk learnedly of the virtues and of the duties, 
 we may say that consideration and a little self-discipline 
 would cure all this. No doubt it would, but the fact re- 
 mains that neither the consideration nor the self-discipline 
 comes. We have very faulty natures to contend with, very 
 faulty peoi^le to live with. We must meet, as best we may, 
 the unhappiness of home. 
 
 If people could tell us what will cure us as well as to 
 tell us what makes us ill, we might all be much better than 
 we are. We believe that the cultivation of good manners 
 and the amenities of life offer the best of all apparent 
 remedies for these serious evils. " Manners are what vex 
 and soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or 
 refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible opera- 
 tion like that of the air we breathe in." 
 
 And, of all places in the world, home is the place in 
 which we should cultivate manners. The very fact that it 
 is difficult and that we desire of all things ease at home 
 is but another reason why we should, in that furnace of 
 trial, cover our too easily smarting flesh with the asbestos 
 of a calm and polite manner. 
 
-THE UNHAPPY HOME. 95 
 
 There is no truer phrdse than that the road to home 
 happiness lies over small stepping-stones. So small are 
 sometimes the causes of our unhappiness that we wonder 
 that the consequences can be so great. 
 
 One very great palliative is the determination by every 
 member of the family not to dwell on the circumstances, 
 whatever they may be, which are alike sad to them all. 
 If it be poverty, let it be cheerfully and silently borne ; 
 if it be the ill temper of Grandpapa, try to make a joke of 
 it. If it be something infinitely worse, and also hopeless, 
 accept it bravely ; do not talk of it. Try, in the family 
 circle, to ignore it ; accept every little enlivening circum- 
 stance ; let in all the sun and air ; work on, and work 
 courageously, knowing that, however near to us an unhap- 
 piness may be, however innocently we may have incurred 
 the stroke of fate, there is One who knows better than 
 we do what may be the best discipline for us, and that 
 among his dispensations may be the unhappiness of home. 
 
XVI. 
 
 THE MUSICAL MEMBER. 
 
 We have spoken of the angelic influence of music in 
 the education of home, and of its result upon the ameni- 
 ties. It now remains for us to consider one possible excess 
 of this virtue which may become a fault. 
 
 There is a conversation upon record of the possible evils 
 of piano playing. It runs somewhat thus : 
 
 " Charlie, I am engaged ! " 
 
 "Ah I I congratulate you." 
 
 " To a lovely girl." 
 
 " No doubt. Is she good, amiable, pretty ? " 
 
 ^' Of course, of course, and more." 
 
 ^^ What— rich?" 
 
 "Ah, yes ! very well ; but better than that." 
 
 "What can be better?" 
 
 " My dear boy, she does not play the piano ! " 
 
 " Ah, my friend, my friend, then she is not a woman — 
 she is an angel ! " 
 
 Much drumming on the piano in a house has led to 
 great home unhappiness to those who have sensitive ears 
 and a somewhat nervous temperament. The practicing of 
 children and young people, though necessary, is most try- 
 ing, and, to old people and to sick people, intolerable. It 
 must be done, however, and the wise mother puts it off 
 into the third story or somewhere where it will incon- 
 venience the fewest people. 
 
THE MUSICAL MEMBER. 97 
 
 In the succeeding stage, when the performer plays 
 pretty well — not very well — the trials to the family are 
 great ; for, while it amuses the performer to pick out the 
 notes of a piece which neither express melody nor tlio 
 mathematical triumph of the performer, the listener is 
 very miserable. The performer is amused ; the performer 
 is learning something ; but the listener is on the rack. 
 
 More than half the pianoforte playing of the world is of 
 this description. We all know the sufferings to Fine Ear, 
 walking through the streets of a city, when the windows 
 are open in early summer, hearing the pianos engaged in 
 a battle royal of pieces played badly, played noisily, and 
 played persistently. This is constant in some houses, and 
 one wonders how a mother who has a number of young 
 daughters ever endures the constant bang ! bang ! of the 
 piano. 
 
 The practice of the scales and of five-finger exercises 
 may be reckoned as among the trials of the home-staying 
 members of the family. Indeed, people with sensitive ears 
 run away from it. How much worse is the melancholy 
 first lesson on the flute, the detestable drone of the trom- 
 bone, and the squeak of the violin ! 
 
 And yet the learner must practice ; it is a necessary 
 evil. An invention which has never been sufficiently ad- 
 mired is a soundless piano, which affords the learner every 
 facility for reading and learning the fingering, and which 
 yet disturbs nobody. 
 
 No one is apt to be more selfish, by the way, than the 
 musical member of the family. If her education is con- 
 ducted with an end to display, she practices her piano 
 and her singing, if she have a voice, or if she wish to create 
 one, without any mercy to others who may be suffering from 
 a headache. She fills the house with what her father calls 
 ** queer foreigners" — Germans generally — who may amuse 
 her, but who do not please the family. She carries her taste 
 
98 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 to excess, until the sound of her piano or her not too musi- 
 cal voice becomes a family nuisance. 
 
 The musical young man is, perhaps, rather unpopular 
 at home. He must have the piano when he wants it, and 
 the others must retire from the parlor while he is practic- 
 ing, or when his musical friends come to see him. 
 
 It is a feature of nineteenth-century fashion that each 
 young man must have a specialty. It is no longer enough 
 that he is a gentleman. He must be a hunting man, a 
 dancing man, a private-theatrical man, a reading man, a 
 dog man, or a musical man. And it is well for society that 
 it is so, if the tastes are sincere, and if a man cultivates a 
 taste because he likes it and because he wishes to make 
 himself agreeable. But, if he cultivates music merely to 
 the end of display, the result is a sad one for his family. If 
 he makes of himself a permanent exhibition, until his vigor- 
 ous rendering of a familiar song becomes monotonous, if he 
 goes through his musical gymnasium constantly, he be- 
 comes a great bore in the family. And such a man is apt 
 to do this sort of perfunctory practicing much of the time. 
 People who have thus led their families through the pain 
 of hearing them practice should be very amiable at home, 
 and play, when they are asked, without much urging. 
 
 But such musical people never wish to play when any 
 member of the family asks them. They do not wish to 
 play the pieces which the family like to hear. They are 
 never in the mood to sing ^' Jock o' Hazeldean," or to play 
 what they call *^ popular music," with a term of reproach. 
 Life is too short, too precious, they say, to play ^* popular 
 music," and they insist upon pla3dng something from 
 Bach, who was a "great contrapuntist," or some other 
 classic author. A national hymn which moves everybody's 
 heart they will neither play nor sing. 
 
 There is no doubt at all of the real American love and 
 appreciation for music, no doubt at all of the wide-spread 
 
THE MUSICAL MEMBER. 99 
 
 amateur culture. More women sing well in our homes than 
 in Florence, London, Paris, or Vienna. The splendid per- 
 formances of our musical societies have gratified a want ; 
 they have also created one, and they have educated a taste. 
 Still, in the light of all these blessings, the musical mem- 
 ber can, if he or she be thoughtless, make the whole family 
 miserable. 
 
 If a girl is thoughtful, she can practice when the fam- 
 ily are out. She can bide her time to be discordant. She 
 can exercise her voice in her walks, when she is among the 
 mountains, where no one will hear her shrieks. She will 
 not sit down or rise up to her scales when her father has 
 just come home weary from his business. She will not play 
 or sing if her mother has Just laid down for a nap which 
 is to ward off a headache. 
 
 And when she is asked to play, she will, if amiable, go 
 to the piano and play at once. She will not need urging, 
 and she will play what she is asked to play, not something 
 too erudite for her hearers. ^' There are pieces of music," 
 says Lamb, ^'^ which do plague and embitter my apprehen- 
 sion." 
 
 " The meaning of song goes deep," says Carlyle. " Who 
 is there that in logical words can express the effect music 
 has on us ? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, 
 which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for 
 moments gaze into that ! " 
 
 Now, when we remember what the musical member can 
 do for home if so inclined, we can hardly forgive one for 
 making home unpleasant. It is an abuse of the privi- 
 leges of home to merely fit ourselves there for outside 
 display. 
 
 "Tunes and airs," says Lord Bacon, "have in them- 
 selves some affinity with the affections, as merry tunes, 
 doleful tunes, solemn tunes, tunes inclining men's minds 
 to pity, warlike tunes, so as it is no marvel if they alter 
 
100 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 the spirits, considering that tunes bear a predisposition to 
 the motion of the spirit." 
 
 We sometimes hear music called ^^the universal lan- 
 guage." When we do so, we must remember that day at 
 the Tower of Babel, when all tongues were confused. The 
 artist or the composer has a life apart, a noble and unique 
 life, to which none of our light satire can apply. It is 
 only to those who in seeking the noble art abuse it, 
 tinker at it, approach it in an inartistic spirit, that we 
 would reproach, and we may add that the practice of mu- 
 sical mechanism is not intellectual ; it does not nourish the 
 brain or feed the heart ; it does not leave the mind at lib- 
 erty to think ; it chokes everything but its own development 
 — so the musical member of the family must exercise all his 
 consideration for his family before he commits himself to 
 his instrument ; for that surely, like a Moloch, will conquer 
 him at once. 
 
 The musician's strict exercise admits of very little imag- 
 ination or emotion ; it requires industry, perception, and 
 nerve. As it becomes more mechanical, it is less refining 
 and elevating. There is a feeling in society that executive 
 and artistic musicians are less distinguished for morality 
 than their neighbors. Whether this is true or not, and 
 whether to the performers of the most heavenly music may 
 be denied the good which they are the means of being to 
 others, we can not decide. Locke says, sententiously, " I 
 have among men of parts and business seldom heard any 
 one commended for having an excellency in music." 
 
 But our only deduction from these various thoughts is 
 this : The musical member of the family should be careful 
 not to disturb the harmony of home. 
 
XVII. 
 
 THE CHEERFUL MEMBER. 
 
 Gayety of heart, innocent and pure, is the delightful 
 daughter of good feeling and cheerfulness ; it is the sun- 
 shine of the mind, the day-dawn of all the faculties. Some 
 of us are born with this gift, but some of us are born 
 grave and somber ; some of us grow sad, and lose our bright- 
 est lance, a laugh, as we go on in life. But, whatever our 
 own mood, we are grateful to that inmate of home who is 
 known as the ** cheerful member." "VVe all appreciate 
 gayety in others. There is no poem like " L' Allegro." 
 
 In the first place, gayety implies courage. There is 
 enough to weep over in the world. We should be forgiven 
 for going about with our heads in a muffler if we only wept 
 over our own mistakes. We could weep over the grave of 
 our once noble motives, our own disillusions, and our lost 
 belief in human nature ; we might even weep over our lost 
 appetite for dinner, satiety, and a changed condition of the 
 palate, which no longer responds to mince-pie. 
 
 But we do not weep when a figure all clad in rose-color, 
 with floating veil flying back upon the wind, comes danc- 
 ing toward us, and calls us to go through green meadows 
 by laughing streams to where the rainbow touches the 
 ground. Why should we weep when we can laugh ? Let 
 us exploit this symbol of our immortality, and laugh like 
 the gods. Gayety is contagious ; it is almost the only good 
 thing which is. One gay person makes a party brilliant ; 
 
102 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 it fills a theatre; every one goes to see a funny piece. 
 It wins the day on the field of battle. The courageous fel- 
 low who can laugh and joke amid grape and shot and can- 
 ister will live to fight another day. 
 
 Hood, as we know, conquered life with gayety, but he 
 also had genius and indomitable will. But the lesson he 
 teaches us is none the less valuable. How Shakespeare 
 loved a woman whose soul was full of gayety ! When he 
 began to sketch Eosalind and Portia, or even the coarser 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, he did not like to leave them. 
 Gayety may be as pure as a rosebud, " frisking light in frolic 
 measure." She is as natural as the lambs and as musical as 
 the birds. 
 
 We owe the French people much for their gifts of gay- 
 ety to us of a slower race. We are perhaps a little too 
 Gothic, too solemn, too much in earnest, to get out of life 
 all that it has of ornament and gayety and cheer. We 
 should indulge in a gayer social architecture, Corinthian 
 capital and flying buttress, some '^chateau en Espagne" 
 — homes of gay and joyous guests. 
 
 The cheerful son of the house ! how dear he is, with his 
 bonny smile, his comic songs, his quips and quirks ! How 
 he bids black care depart, and brings a smile to the lips of 
 the sad, overburdened father, the despondent mother, who 
 has perhaps laid one of her lambs away in the churchyard ! 
 How much the family lean on the buoyant spirit ! He 
 never believes in the worst ; he is no pessimist. He believes 
 in the best, thinks the sick will get well, the bad reform, 
 the traveler will arrive safe at his journey's end. He never 
 foments a quarrel or touches on the family weak spot. 
 He has tact (all gay people are apt to have it), and he 
 avoids saying disagreeable things. His fine temper makes 
 him a sincere but adroit flatterer. He finds everybody 
 looking well, everybody in first-rate condition. Eain does 
 not wet him nor fire scorch. He is the *' cheerful member." 
 
THE CHEERFUL MEMBER. 103 
 
 Even ill-health can not quell that delightful laugh. He 
 knits up " the raveled sleeve of care " ; he is better than 
 sleep ; he is better than a dinner of twelve courses. His 
 temperament is gracious/ and of the sweetest and sunniest ; 
 he is the brightest of all the influences of home. 
 
 Growing out of gayety in good women comes another 
 grace, cordiality of manner. Who can separate the two ? 
 Cordiality must come with a smile. Sometimes she is a 
 little grave, then we call her ** cheerfulness ;" but, in her 
 best estate, cordiality and gayety are sworn friends. The 
 cheerful, gay woman who can keep her family laughing, 
 who can laugh herself, has half conquered life by that 
 power. There is something to laugh at in the gloomiest 
 lot. We can steal sunbeams out of cucumbers, if we choose. 
 • One reason why gayety and cordiality are such good 
 virtues is that they are unegotistical. A person goes out 
 of himself when he is gay ; he retires within himself when 
 he is sullen and when he is angry. Justice, verity, tem- 
 perance, stableness, perseverance, and patience are some- 
 what egotistical virtues. They may not conduce to cheer- 
 fulness. The '^ professedly pious" are not all cheerful, 
 although they should be. Sometimes wounded vanity mas- 
 querades as repentance. 
 
 The cheerful member is a great physician. He cures 
 many a fancied disease ; he lights up the darkest day ; Avith 
 his song and laugh there is always company in the house ; 
 he goes through life as a guest — for everybody entertains 
 him. 
 
 ^'^Such a man creams off nature, leaving the sour and 
 the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. " 
 
 The cheerful person is master of all his talents, powers, 
 and faculties ; his imagination is clear, his judgment undis- 
 turbed, his temper is even and unruffled. He tlierefore is 
 most useful in the world of action. He has a beneficent 
 influence upon all with whom he converses, bringing out 
 
104 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 their best gifts, and his attitude toward his Maker is the 
 best and highest, because it is that of constant and habitual 
 gratitude. 
 
 Of course, we can not but acknowledge that these fortu- 
 nate gay people are born, and not made ; we must admire 
 and copy tliem if we can. We can not all be like them. 
 
 Arthur Helps says: **Be cheerful, no matter what re- 
 verse obstructs your pathway or what plague follows you in 
 your trail to annoy you. Do not allow despair to unnerve 
 your energies ! '' This is good advice, but he might as well 
 tell us to be beautiful. We will be cheerful of course if we 
 can ! 
 
 We have learned from observation of others, and from 
 experience ourselves, that wealth and external prosperity 
 have nothing to do with either gayety or cheerfulness. 
 AVealth is a great blessing ; rightly used, it is an immense 
 convenience. Where we have it not, it seems to be the 
 very thing we have most needed and wanted. 
 
 But we do not see the rich any more cheerful than the 
 poor. The very poor are exceedingly cheerful. The happy 
 man of the comedy had no shirt. 
 
 We are not, ourselves, if Heaven send us wealth, apt to 
 be more cheerful. We become afraid, covetous, grasping, 
 nervous, careful. We have something to lose — which is 
 always a bad position to be in. 
 
 It is not the rich young man who is the happiest. 
 Many dog-carts, T-carts, coaches and four, club windows, 
 good dinners, perpetual feasting, hunting-fields, and race- 
 courses do not make a man happy. Would that they did ! 
 For, then, some fortunate parent would buy happiness for 
 his son ; and we have never heard of any millionaire who 
 could do that. 
 
 The happy fellow is he who goes whistling and singing 
 to his work ; he never meets Ennui — has never been intro- 
 duced to him. 
 
THE CnEERFUL MEMBER. 105 
 
 The old simile of the grindstones, which, if no grist is 
 put in between, will grind themselves, applies to the rich 
 man who has nothing to do. A man can buy fine houses, 
 toadies, appanage, vassalage, followers, and flatterers, with 
 money, good clothes also, and choice wines, but he can not 
 buy cheerfulness. That must be inherited or earned. 
 
 We look into the homes of the poor for cheerfulness. 
 The greatest man of antiquity was the poorest. What a 
 warm sympathy, what glee, what happiness are there in the 
 humble home, when talent, taste, and genius dwell with 
 poverty ! That iron band which holds them together so 
 stanchly and so nearly — which excludes indulgence and 
 sensuality — has caught one guest not asked ; it is Gayety, 
 and there is always room for him. Poverty has directed 
 their activity into safe and right channels, and made them 
 strong and cheerful. 
 
 *^ The affectionate delight with which they greet the 
 return of each one after the early separations which school 
 or business requires, the foresight with which during such 
 absences they hive the honey which opportunity offers for 
 the ear and the imagination of the others, and the unre- 
 strained glee with which they disburden themselves of 
 their early mental treasures when the holidays bring them 
 together " — all this is to be seen in the homes of the men 
 to whom Heaven has answered the prayer, ** Give me 
 neither poverty nor riches." 
 
 The house of the rich man is spacious, often lonely. 
 The house of the poor man is crowded and inconvenient, 
 but it is cheerful. 
 
 "The household gods of the poor man are of flesh and 
 blood, with no alloy of silver or gold or precious stones. 
 He has no property but in the affections of his own heart, 
 and, when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of toil 
 and scanty meals, that man has his love of home from God, 
 and his rude hut becomes a cheerful place. '' 
 
XVIII. 
 
 THE GOOD FATHER. 
 
 It is one of the misfortunes of our American way of 
 living that the head of the house, the father — he who is the 
 support, the mainstay, the highest central figure — sliould 
 be scarcely able to live with his family at all. If he is a 
 busy man, earning their daily bread, he must leave them 
 after a hasty breakfast, to meet them again at a late dinner 
 with a chance of seeing them in the evening ; but, if a 
 club man, or anxious for the opportunity of going out in 
 the evening for improvement or change, he does not see 
 much of his family even then. The younger children get 
 to regard him as a feature of Sundays, and perhaps asso- 
 ciate him with the unpleasant slavery of sitting still in 
 church. A loving and kind father will, of course, impress 
 himself upon his family and earn their affection and respect 
 even in these brief intervals ; but it is too little for the 
 proper emphasis of an affection which should be almost 
 the first in our hearts. 
 
 There must be something radically wrong in the ar- 
 rangements of life when this can happen. Either women 
 should enter more into the business of life or man should 
 work less, for a father is the natural teacher, guardian, and 
 companion of his family. We will, for the moment, ig- 
 nore the fact that he may desire the rest and the comforts 
 of the home which he supports but scarcely enjoys ; we 
 will consider only the loss to his children of his society. 
 
THE GOOD FATHER. 107 
 
 The father is, of course, the natural and the best com- 
 panion for his boys ; to teach them to swim, to ride, to 
 master the common knowledge and accomplishments of 
 life, should be his pleasure. He should be their teacher in 
 the arts of gunnery and the noble science of the fishing-rod. 
 They ought to be able to remember him as the story-teller 
 and companion of their sports, the best guide, and the 
 most agreeable company that they will ever know. How 
 they hang on his lips as he tells them of his own boyhood, 
 his sufferings at the poorly fed boarding-school, where he 
 had to gather raw turnips in the field ! How they like to 
 hear of the size of his first trout ; how magnificent he looks 
 to them as he tells of his shooting a deer ! How much, as 
 they grow older, they enjoy his college stories ! His early 
 struggles and conquests give them heart for the same strife 
 and victory which they are about to plunge into. 
 
 It is a very happy circumstance also for the grown 
 daughters if their father, after having petted them as little 
 girls, after helping to solve the difficult question in arith- 
 metic, after construing the Latin, and giving them a little 
 sweep of his strong penmanship, is still young and fresh 
 enough to go out into society with them. 
 
 They like to enter a party on his arm ; they like to have 
 him take them about between the dances. They feel that 
 they have a strong government behind them, and are some- 
 what independent of partners. A young-minded papa is 
 a great boon to a daughter. 
 
 But here again comes in a national mistake. Our best 
 men will rarely go to parties ; they leave all that work to 
 the mamma. Fatigued they no doubt are by their hard fight 
 with the world, and society offers them no seat, no wel- 
 come. Boys are leading the German. Boys are crowding 
 the supper-table. The wealthy, important merchant goes to 
 a ball to find his third clerk of much more importance than 
 he is, and he naturally retires disgusted. It is an exces- 
 
108 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 sively vulgar state of society, where mature men are thus 
 driven out, but it is alone the mature men who can cor- 
 rect it. 
 
 When our middle-aged men will make a point of going 
 into society, then, and not till then, will they become a part 
 of it, and the women will find, what many of them have 
 already found, that they are much better worth talking to 
 than the boys. 
 
 A good father owes it to his wife and children to thus 
 keep pace with them in their amusements, not allowing 
 himself to get rusty, or to have an entirely different set of 
 ideas and occupations. They can not enter into his pro- 
 fessional or business life. When he leaves after breakfast, he 
 becomes a mystery to them. But he can, on his return, go 
 with them to the theatre, the party, or the concert, and 
 should try to do so to make himself a part of them. 
 
 They, in their turn, the sons and daughters, should have 
 every delicate attention, every agreeable accomplishment, 
 ready to make home delightful to the father who works for 
 them. There is something pathetic in the idea of the 
 chained slave, chained to the oar, to whom all look for 
 money, clothing, food. If he is a millionaire, all goes well, 
 but if he is a struggling man, threatened with ruin, know- 
 ing that so long as he lives he must pull up the stony hill, 
 the only reward when he reaches the top the going down 
 on the other side, it is sad enough. It is wonderful that so 
 many men bear it patiently, and accept it as the inevitable 
 doom ! 
 
 What fireside can be made too easy for such a man ? 
 What good dinners, cheerful faces, what voices full of obe- 
 dience, should greet the hard-working, patient man ! His 
 newspaper should be aired, his slippers ready, his particular 
 magazine in waiting, with the paper-knife in place. His 
 favorite tastes should be consulted, his cigars and allumettes 
 in readiness. All the disagreeable remarks about bills and 
 
TEE GOOD FATHER. 109 
 
 the coal should be deferred until after breakfast next morn- 
 ing — that moment conceded by all for disagreeable com- 
 munications. He should be forgiven if he is abstracted and 
 silent. His cares may be greater than he can bear, but he 
 should be tenderly moved to talk, and be merry, at least 
 cheerful. 
 
 We all know families in which the mother and daughters 
 are in conspiracy against the father, where he is looked 
 upon simply as a bank to be robbed, where the buying of 
 expensive dresses must go on, whether they can be paid for 
 or not, and where the asking for and obtaining of money 
 i^ all the need they have of him. Henry James, Jr., has 
 drawn the picture in '^ The Pension Beauregard," his com- 
 panion-piece to " Daisy Miller." Such rapacity and vulgar- 
 ity are too common. They belong to the abuses of home. 
 
 But we know many another home where there are si- 
 lent economies practiced, heart-breaking ones sometimes, 
 rather than to "ask father for money"; where each one 
 feels a personal indebtedness to the hard-working head of 
 the house, and where each one sighs for the time when ho 
 or she can help along. 
 
 The household is the home of the man as well as of the 
 child. To it he should bring all that is best in him : his 
 culture, if he has any, at least, his lofty, true thoughts, his 
 benevolence and refinement. He should not, in getting 
 rich, sacrifice himself. This is too great a price to pay for 
 bread and lodging, fine hangings and fine clothes. A busi- 
 ness man should take time to read, else when he becomes a 
 man of leisure, he will find that he can not read. He must 
 bring into his household that spirit which is understanding, 
 health, and self-help. There was never a country which 
 offered to the working man, the business man, the true 
 man, such opportunity for a happy home as this. He can, 
 in the first place, be educated without money ; he can go to 
 work without it. He can begin without patronage ; the 
 
 10 
 
110 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 field is as open to the poor boy as to the rich one. It is 
 character which determines everything. 
 
 It is sad to be obliged to confess that many a home, full 
 of prosperity, full of rosy children, is still unhappy be- 
 cause of some mistake of father or mother, or both, some 
 unruly tongue, some implacable temper ! It seems as if a 
 demon stood at the door and warned happiness away. Noth- 
 ing can be urged in such a case but the old, old remedy 
 of good manners, manners which shall compel an outward 
 decency, and which will make one hesitate to exhibit the 
 shame of an open quarrel. To see one's parents quarrel is 
 the most dreadful suffering, the most acute mortification, 
 to a family of children. 
 
 **Many a marriage has commenced, like the morning, 
 red, and perished like a mushroom. Wherefore ? Be- 
 cause the married pair neglected to ' be as agreeable to 
 each other after their union as they were before it," says 
 that intelligent old maid Fredrika Bremer. Old maids 
 always write well about marriage and the education of 
 children. Perhaps the looker-on is the best judge of the 
 game. 
 
 The quarrels of married people who really love each 
 other and which come from irritated temper are soon 
 healed, and the daily life goes on without a sensible break 
 between them. But, for the sake of their home, these dis- 
 sensions should be avoided as much as possible. They both 
 lose dignity and place in the ideas of their family, and the 
 servants are not as apt to obey. 
 
 A father should never under any circumstances permit 
 his children to treat him with disrespect. They will never 
 forgive him for it even if he forgives. Nor should he desert 
 his post as captain of the ship. In those unhappy families, 
 where, as in the tragedy of ^' King Lear," we see the result 
 of power given away, there is a perpetual lesson of the folly 
 of a father's renunciation of his power. Happy for him if 
 
THE GOOD FATHER, 111 
 
 in his group of daughters there be one Cordelia to balance 
 Regan and Goneril. 
 
 The wise father will so graduate his expenditure, if 
 living on an income, that his expected expenditure will 
 reach but two thirds of his income, knowing well that the 
 unexpected will consume the other third. The trouble is in 
 America that no one knows exactly what his income is. 
 In England he can tell to the quarter of a penny, even for 
 his great-grandchildren. But here, where by far the largest 
 number live from hand to mouth, thorough economy is 
 almost impossible. Things look well one year, and a hos- 
 pitable table, good clothes, and fine carriages are not im- 
 possible. Things look very much less well the next year, 
 and these now necessaries of life become impossible ; so the 
 business of making one's house a scene of consistent ex- 
 penditure, without miserly prudence or injudicious luxury, 
 is a very difficult one. Our exchequer resembles our cli- 
 mate — heavy rains or a long drought. We do not know 
 which to calculate upon. 
 
 It is quite impossible, too, in a liberally conducted 
 household, to calculate on the peculations of servants. The 
 families who are fed even out of a well-guarded basement 
 door are in the proportion of three to one. Just so many 
 servants, so many leaks. There is such a thing as an honest 
 servant, but they are rare. They have a great central idea 
 of honor and good fellowship. They will not tell of each 
 other. A servant who complains of her fellow-servant is out 
 of the aristocracy of the kitchen. Who can watch the flour- 
 barrel, the coal-heap, the coffee-bag ? The emptying of 
 the tea-chest, the diminution of the sugar-barrel, is imper- 
 ceptible, like the dew. One only knows it is going when it 
 is gone. 
 
 No wonder that people seek to live in apartment houses, 
 as offering them an economy of servants ; and yet we read 
 of one paterfamilias who discovered that the steward 
 
112 AM.ENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 stood, like Bishop Hatto in the old Ehine River, and 
 took toll hoth ways, opening all the bundles and taking a 
 spoonful of sugar or a handful of flour, then deftly tying 
 them up again. On being found out, he confessed the 
 crime, saying that he thought a teaspoonful of brown sugar 
 would never be missed. His lodger oifered to pay him 
 extra if he would let the packages alone, but he could not 
 promise, as the excitement of the game amused him, and 
 doubtless he kept a boy to retie the packages. 
 
 All these facts work against a thoroughly understood 
 and possible economy. All that the good father can do is 
 to aim at making his children feel that home is the hap- 
 piest place in the world, as he and their mother should aim 
 at making it the best. 
 
XIX. 
 
 THE GOOD WIFE. 
 
 *' Wife" is said to be the most agi'eeable and delightful 
 name in nature. A woman indeed ventures much when 
 she assumes it, for it is to her the final throw for happiness 
 or unhappiness. Be she ever so good, so gifted, so true, so 
 noble, she may marry a man who will disgrace her and 
 make her unhappy ; she has no security whatever against 
 the most cruel fate. 
 
 And home must be her battle-ground. The man has 
 the world before him, where to choose ; therefore, an un- 
 happy marriage is but one bitter drop in his full cup. 
 With the wife, it is the whole draught. Let her weigh 
 well the dangers of the future ; even with prudence she 
 may not escape misfortune. 
 
 It is well if she can always think her husband wise, 
 whether he is or not. She is a happy woman who can make 
 her husband always a hero. She is happiest who is hum- 
 blest, and who takes a pleasure in looking up. Not that 
 we would ignore or despise the moral beauty of great cour- 
 age in Avomen or a proper belief in themselves. The rare 
 heights which women have reached through their struggles 
 and by means of their self-dependence and courage are to 
 be regarded with awe and admiration. 
 
 The trouble is, that women have not quite the courage 
 of their opinions. They have a certain degree of courage, 
 and then they halt. This often puts a woman in a perilous 
 
114 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 attitude of indecision. A woman may wish to keep her 
 manners at the true leyel of social restriction, and yet she 
 may have longings for a higher sphere. 
 
 This yery ambition to be better, wiser, more free to act 
 out her own character, may in the attitude of wife make 
 her uneasy and uncomfortable. There are great characters 
 who are cheerful in a lonely adherence to the right. There 
 are others which must have the sympathy and love and 
 admiration of those near them, or they are miserable. 
 
 They can not help this uneasiness, this belief that they 
 were born for other duties than the chronicling of small 
 beer, and yet they do not like to move out of the beaten 
 track, knowing very well that the people who govern the 
 world and who are respected are those who move in the 
 conventional track, shocking nobody — souls which find 
 their highest aspirations satisfied with the making of af- 
 ghans and the embroidery of tidies. 
 
 Women, however, are obliged, like men, to live out their 
 own natures, and to use their talents as men are. Talent 
 and spirit will not slumber or sleep. Irrespective of ridi- 
 cule and regardless of happiness, a great woman must 
 manifest her intellectual or moral supremacy. Happy for 
 the gifted woman, if there be a vital refinement in her 
 mind which keeps her from making her gifts but illustra- 
 tions of her weaknesses. 
 
 A good wife, if it ever occurs to her that her husband is 
 her inferior, conceals the fact religiously; many a witty 
 wife has put good stories into her husband's lips — a for- 
 givable deceit. Women have the talent of ready utterance 
 to much greater perfection than men ; they are quicker- 
 witted ; they have more ready tact. A wife's mind has 
 traveled over the whole journey, and started home again, 
 often before the husband has gone ten miles ; but she has 
 (or should have) the sense to keep silent until he has 
 caught up with her. 
 
THE GOOD WIFE, 115 
 
 No women are so detestable as those who make '^game" 
 of their husbands in public, who show them up to the 
 world, and exhibit their defects. If a husband speaks bad 
 grammar, his wife should ignore the fact, and bid him dis- 
 course as if it were a nightingale. She honors herself by 
 concealing his defects. She degrades herself if she lowers 
 him. There are disinterestedness and self-devotion in a' 
 woman's character, sometimes, of which man seems incapa- 
 ble. She should show it all as a wife. 
 
 However badly wIa'Cs behave in prosperity, the authors 
 and philosophers do give them credit for behaving well in 
 adversity. They show then that in the vainest and most 
 frivolous heart ** there is a spark of heavenly fire which 
 beams and blazes in the dark hours of adversity. " 
 
 " Women are in their natures far more gay and joyous 
 than men, whether it be that their blood is more refined, 
 their fibers more delicate, and their animal spirits more 
 light and volatile, or whether, as some have imagined, there 
 may not be a kind of sex in the very soul. As vivacity is 
 the gift of women, so is gravity that of man." 
 
 Women are very fond of admiration. They love flat- 
 tery and fine clothes, and grow frivolous, almost from the 
 very necessity of the case. The worst faults of women are 
 fed by the admiration of men, for the very youngest girl is 
 not long in seeing that her prettiest and most frivolous 
 companion is assured of the highest social success. 
 
 As a wife, she must sometimes observe that her husband 
 is attracted by the very faults which he most deprecates in 
 her, and that, if his homage can be won from her, it is by 
 the exhibition of qualities which her own self-respect would 
 prevent her from exhibiting. 
 
 So, from first to last, a good wife has need of all her 
 virtue, all her strength, and all her good sense. She must 
 put a thousand disappointments and little injuries and 
 small injustices in her pocket. She may be very much as- 
 
116 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 sured that, if she keeps up an imperturbable good temper, 
 serenity, and composure, that Monsieur will be won back 
 at last, and admire her more than he has done Madame 
 Fugatif. 
 
 The good wife accepts her husband's dictum as to the 
 scale of splendor on which she shall arrange her house. 
 She learns from him how much she shall spend ; she helps 
 him to economize ; she even sometimes restricts his too 
 ardent fancy in the way of opera-boxes and pictures. A 
 wife of frugal mind is a great help to a man, if she be not 
 mean. A miserly woman is a contradiction in terms, for 
 women should be '* loving and giving, ^^ 
 
 As a good wife, a woman brings up her children to re- 
 spect their father, to obey him, to accept his advice rather 
 than her own ; to be the vice-regent in the house is her 
 chosen position. Never does she secretly, as some bad 
 wives do, plot against his known wishes. Eeligion, politics, 
 business, social position, expenditure — she allows him to 
 decide all these things, if he wishes to do so. It is a man's 
 prerogative. 
 
 She reserves the right to think for herself ; to, in a 
 measure, lead her own life, choose her own books, her own 
 amusements, and her own friends, and her home is a much 
 happier one if she brings into it some element of variety, 
 for, as we have said, each member of the home should be 
 an individual. 
 
 Society is in the hands of the women almost exclu- 
 sively in this country. Most men like to see their wives 
 shine in society ; it gratifies their pride. Good company, 
 lively conversation, brightening up the wits, makes a wife 
 twice as agreeable a companion. Society, too, is the true 
 sphere of many women ; they are lost out of it. Without 
 carrying it too far, women are much better for a social 
 taste. They get moody else. In social life difficulties are 
 met and conquered, restraints of temper become necessary. 
 
THE GOOD WIFE. 117 
 
 and striving to behave rightly in these emergencies will 
 help to fit a woman to behave rightly at home. She is use- 
 ful to others, and is improving herself. If she is always at 
 home, she is apt to become morbid and introspective. 
 
 She should be at home when her husband wants her. 
 He is the first society which she should seek, nor should 
 she ever accept with patience any indignity to him. He 
 may not be as great an ornament to society as she is, no 
 matter ; he must go with her, and to him she always shows 
 a most respectful observance. And she must not break 
 her heart if, after treating her like a goddess, he comes 
 down and treats her like a woman. It is not in the nature 
 of man to keep up on the highest stilts of admiration and 
 love all the time. She must accept his more commonplace 
 liking. 
 
 And let her preserve a disposition to be pleased, not 
 slighting the humble blessing of an every-day good fellow- 
 ship. 
 
 A good wife remembers her husband's dignity, and is 
 more than ever careful not to compromise it. She is more 
 careful than when she was a girl, because then laughter, 
 playfulness, and coquetry were allowable ; now, for every 
 fault of hers, husband and children must suffer. She can 
 not be too considerate of them. 
 
 A man of wit and sense, who looks upon his wife with 
 pleasure, confidence, and admiration, will have few com- 
 ments to make on the amount of pleasure she may take in 
 the company of other men. A jealous husband is a tyrant, 
 whom no propriety of conduct can appease. The races of 
 the Othellos, the Borgias, and the Cencis are not extinct. 
 A woman can not supply all the failings of the man who 
 loves her and whom she loves, but it is her duty to try to 
 do so. 
 
 A good wife who is married to a great man — the " peo- 
 ple's idol," a favorite clergyman, a noted orator, or an 
 
118 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 Adonis — has a hard part to act. The world owns her idol, 
 and she has to accept the quota which the world leaves. 
 She has to see him adored by other women ; to know that, 
 officially, he must accept the confidences of other women, 
 which do not come to her ; she sees the world seeking him 
 first, and her, perhaps, not at all. This is a very trying 
 position. The wives of noted authors, particularly in 
 England, where the wife is not always invited with her 
 husband, have had some rather trying experiences of this 
 kind. Would that they could all behave as well as did 
 Moore's Bessy ! 
 
 It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world 
 to live for others rather than herself, to live, yes, and to die 
 for them. Let her never forget that she was sent here to 
 make man better, to temper his greed, control his avarice, 
 soften his temper, refine his grosser nature, and teach him 
 that there is something better than success. These thoughts 
 will come to help her in the lonely hours when he is receiv- 
 ing homage and she is not. She may be apt to remember, 
 too, that she has been his inspiration, his guiding star, that 
 but for her he would not have been the poet, the orator, or 
 the preacher. 
 
 There is said to be no burden on earth like the foolish 
 woman tied to the competent man, with the one exception 
 of the false woman. No good wife would care to fill either 
 of these two disagreeable alternatives. But many women, 
 otherwise good wives, have allowed wounded vanity to come 
 in and wreck the happiness of home. 
 
 More than one literary lion has cursed his celebrity when 
 it has brought to him the unhappiness of home. It is said 
 to have been one of the reasons of the separation of Mr. and 
 Mrs. Dickens. 
 
 The wife may find that her ideal is made of clay, and of 
 very poor clay at that. But she only makes herself ridicu- 
 lous by showing up his faults to the world. Whatever else 
 
THE GOOD WIFE. 119 
 
 he is, he is her husband, and there are but few faults which 
 he can commit of which she should speak. A wife, who 
 finds that as years go on she and her husband are drifting 
 farther and farther apart, is indeed to be pitied. 
 
 As we grow old, we shall need each other more and more; 
 the faltering steps down the hill should be taken hand in 
 hand, and we should invoke all the amenities of home and 
 all its capabilities to draw us together again. We should 
 purify the current of earthly affection, which is growing 
 turbid by the water of life, remembering that true passion 
 comes first, but true love last. 
 
XX. 
 
 MAKING HOME ATTEACTIVE. 
 
 There are few women who do not try for this, and few 
 women who, trying, do not succeed. The poorest woman 
 can now with very little money make a pretty room, and 
 save it from the lonely, sordid, or conventional look of a 
 room in a boarding-house. She can avoid horsehair sofas 
 and violent carpets, charge frescoes, and vulgar prints on the 
 walls. Good engravings, a little cretonne, some knick- 
 knacks made by herself, a few grasses, a growing plant, and 
 an open fire are all that are needed to make a room pleasant 
 and refined. 
 
 What a pity it is that in a country covered with wood a 
 wood fire should be an expensive luxury, for there is nothing 
 like it to make home attractive ! It burns up many a quar- 
 rel and morbid speculation, rights many a wrong, and pro- 
 motes peace. No picture is so utterly cheerful as that of 
 the family gathering round it as evening falls. No conver- 
 sations are so fresh and witty as those which go up with the 
 sparks. No companion is so lively and invigorating to the 
 invalid, the recluse, the mourner, or the aged as a wood 
 fire. It is the most healthful of all ventilators, the most 
 picturesque picture, the most enlivening suggestion of en- 
 ergy and thrift. It is the most fragrant bouquet, the most 
 eloquent of orators. It is a story-teller to the fanciful, and 
 a juggler to those who love the marvelous. What fairy tales 
 does it not tell with its sparks on the back of the chimney ! 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE. 12i 
 
 What combinations of initials it presents to the lovers, who 
 read " A " and '* E " mysteriously combined in a true-lovers' 
 knot, written in fire, as is their love ! Wliat strange shapes 
 the logs take to those who intrust their fortune-telling to 
 its mystic revelation ! What dreamy fancies go up in the 
 smoke ! 
 
 Nothing is so healthful as a wood fire in a sick-room. 
 Certain physicians say that it will cure some diseases. In 
 cities, however, we have nothing to take its place but cannel 
 coal, wliich makes a bright and lively fire, and which is the 
 next best thing to the wood fire, and which should be used 
 in every living-room. 
 
 What a fine old-fashioned distinction that is, by the way, 
 the Uving-voom ! As if the rooms kept for company were 
 dead rooms, rooms full of ghostly furniture, kept for show, 
 and of cold and fearful aspect. In a true home every room 
 should be a living-room. We should live all over our houses, 
 have nothing too fine to use. Of course the nursery should 
 hold the young destroyers, until they know what not to 
 break, if that knowledge ever comes. But, to a trooping 
 set of happy boys and girls, the house should be open and 
 free. 
 
 Each person will find his sanctum, of course, and every 
 one should, if possible, have a room to himself. There 
 should be some place for those who must work to retire to, 
 where solitude would be possible. But the dining-room, 
 the library, and the parlor should be cheerful and orderly, 
 and always lighted up by some constant and familiar pres- 
 ence. Somebody should be there to welcome the wanderers, 
 to greet the stranger, and to gath'er the children together as 
 a hen gathers her chickens under her wings. This person 
 is generally the mother, who is the core of home. 
 - It is this hour of reunion, this happy hour by the wood 
 fire, which pays her for all her work, all her trials. If she 
 can see her group passing into a respectable manhood and 
 11 
 
122 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 womanhood, if she can see happy, honest, hopeful, indus- 
 trious sons, and blooming, modest daughters, she compounds 
 with the past for all its pains, its desperate despair, its hard 
 usage of herself. She does not mind her altered face and 
 figure, the gray hair, the age which has come too soon. Her 
 work is done, she has made a happy home, and its fruit is 
 before her intact. 
 
 Even if she has failed in her loftiest ambitions, even if 
 she has not made heroes of her sons, or eminent women of 
 her daughters, let her be grateful that she has done no worse. 
 Let her be grateful for the strength which has not failed 
 her at the death-bed of her lost ones, that has not given out 
 in the darkest hour, that has sustained the falling, animated 
 the discouraged, and kept that sacred flame alight on the 
 hearthstone which will in future years be the altar fire to 
 all who remember her. The true home is that where there 
 have been sorrow, self-sacrifice, struggle, renunciation, 
 courage, heroism ; and happy are they who have through 
 all discouragements preserved it. - 
 
 The valuable influence of sisters in a family of brothers 
 can not be too strongly emphasized in the subject of the 
 amenities of home. Not only do they or should they give 
 a feminine refinement to the house, but the very duty which 
 they have the right to require of their brothers, those acts 
 of personal attention and gallantry, the accompanying of 
 them to parties and to theatres, and the instinct which 
 makes them their sisters' most chivalrous defenders, all go 
 far toward making them gentlemen. It is the sister's fault 
 if she is not a refining and a corrective influence in her 
 brother's life. In this day of mannish young girls it is to 
 be feared that she is not altogether as universally so as she 
 should be ; but a sister should strive for that position. She 
 should strive for her brothers' affection and confidence, and 
 should endeavor to enlighten them upon the character of 
 the girls whom they may marry. She knows them, and 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE. 123 
 
 men can not know the characters of women as another 
 woman can. 
 
 The refining influence of young girls upon young boys 
 has led many thoughtful persons to advise the establish- 
 ment of mixed schools, where the sexes may meet, as in 
 the home circle, for mutual improvetnent. It certainly 
 improves the boys. They are more anxious to be clean, 
 to brush their hair, to have better manners at table. 
 Whether it is so good for the girls remains to be proved. 
 It is doubtful if the young people should be exposed to the 
 early temptation of falling in love while the severe business 
 of study is being required of them. 
 
 To make home happy when there is even one nagging, 
 hateful, unjust person in it, one who is full of small un- 
 amiabilities, one who will take the blower down from the 
 fire when another has put it up, who will angrily shut a 
 window when another has thrown it open, who will study 
 to put out lights which have just been carefully lighted to 
 enable a person to read, and so on — the list is a long one — 
 is a difficult matter. Injustice and petty tyranny go a 
 long way toward ruining the character of children, and 
 those who grow up in a house where the father has always 
 been unjust to their mother, those who see him doing these 
 little things daily, to make her uncomfortable, have little 
 chance of becoming cheerful and good members of society. 
 
 ** That remembered bitterness has colored my whole 
 view of human nature," said a man 'of fifty years of age, as 
 he spoke of the treatment which his mother had received 
 at the hands of his father, from the dressing of a salad up to 
 the education of the children. But women can bear it, 
 and should do it for the children's sake. The idea of home 
 is worth it all ; and she who does bear it is one of God's 
 saints and martyrs. 
 
 So with an unworthy mother. The father and the chil- 
 dren should combine to cover up this most radical and 
 
124 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 thorough disintegration of home. It is touching to see 
 some young girl rising like a delicate flower, which seeks to 
 become a tree, that it may give shelter and food and rest to 
 those who cluster beneath its shade. A woman in making 
 a good home shelters not only her own, but the houseless 
 children of less worthy women. How many friendless boys 
 there are in the world who come gratefully to such a shel- 
 ter ! How many a sick and weary pilgrim, deserted by 
 those whom he has trusted, floats into this safe harbor ! 
 Every member of a happy household goes out into the 
 world to find these waifs, whom he brings home to the fam- 
 ily table and the family protection. It is one of the best 
 privileges of home to the benevolent, this power of doing 
 all the good which thus accidentally comes in one's way. 
 
 Many a young man living forlornly in lodgings has 
 been saved from fatal illness and despair by the kind inter- 
 position of some family who have found him out and have 
 taken him home, who have nursed him in illness, encour- 
 aging him to hope and to recover. Many a house becomes 
 a " home for the friendless " in this way. Certainly a noble 
 hospitality. 
 
 It is not the richest house which is the most hospitable ; 
 so no one need be discouraged in the attempt to be hospit- 
 able by want of money. It is charming to one's self-love 
 to have a well-furnished house, a French cook, and a beau- 
 tiful dinner service, a butler and fine wines, and to ask 
 one's friends to come to excellent dinners, to see hoAV well 
 we live. But those of lesser means have the power to 
 give, and to exercise the true spirit of the most sincere hos- 
 pitality without these adjuncts. 
 
 Home, being a strong background, should not be care- 
 lessly used to give a factitious respectability to those who 
 are unworthy. Women of large hearts sometimes do this 
 wrong to the world. In their earnest desire to help the 
 unfortunate, they take in a person of uncertain character, 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE. 125 
 
 and launch upon the world an adventuress or a rascal. 
 *' He or she has Mrs. So and So's indorsement ; he has lived 
 in her family. " This has started many a specious vagabond 
 in society. This looseness of goodness has done much 
 harm. Of course, we can not help being sometimes de- 
 ceived ourselves, but we can help being culpably careless. 
 
 Much of this kind of patronage undoubtedly springs 
 from a love of approbation, wliich is a poor motive. Peo- 
 ple like to patronize and to be looked up to ; they like to 
 hear themselves spoken of as being generous, noble, and 
 hospitable. The flattery of those whom we have rescued 
 from a doubtful position is sweet, in vast contrast with the 
 utter want of gratitude which often comes to us from those 
 who owe us everything. We do not always receive the 
 praises due to us for the work we have really done, and the 
 heart of woman craves praise. Glad is she to get it, even 
 from the unworthy. 
 
 But here the hospitable heart should stop and ask her- 
 self these questions : "Is my motive in taking in this 
 woman purely generous and sincerely kind ? Do I know 
 her well enough to make her a member of my family ? 
 Have I a right to give her the prestige of my name and 
 family, which she will receive if known as my protegee 9 " 
 
 We have dwelt but little on the duty which every head 
 of a family owes to herself, her family, and the outside 
 world, in allowing no scandal to be talked at her table or 
 by her fireside. 
 
 The character of some houses in this respect is fearful. 
 "Ye who enter in, leave all hope behind" ; for your flesh 
 will be pecked from your very bones. Some families have 
 a keen wit, impinging tempers, sharp speech, and an om- 
 nivorous appetite for unhandsome traditions of their neigh- 
 bors. They batten on human character, and to dilate 
 upon the many stories which float around concerning every- 
 body is their best amusement. A " mauvaise langue " is a 
 
126 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 fearful gift. It makes a woman powerful but hated. " She 
 is a great gossip," *'she is a talker/' is the worst of all 
 reputations in a neighborhood. 
 
 It is difficult for the mother of bright and witty young 
 people to keep them from the over-exercise of their tongues. 
 They catch the grotesque and funny side of things intui- 
 tively. They are not too particular as to what they say of 
 their companions ; and there is nobody who can not be ridi- 
 culed. Therefore they grow into scandal-mongers inno- 
 cently at first, and regard the amusement of making people 
 laugh at their friends as an element of being agreeable. 
 This grows into bitterness, and the attributing of ignoble 
 motives as they grow older, on the part of those who find 
 life disappointing, and whose experience does not tend to 
 soften them. Therefore a rule, formed early in life, to not 
 speak ill of anybody, no matter what the provocation, would 
 be most useful and beneficent. 
 
 Children and young people should be warned against 
 the dangers of mimicry. It is an amusing but a dangerous 
 gift ; and he who cultivates it will sooner or later get into 
 difficulty. 
 
 "Whatever tends to form manners or to finish men has 
 great value. Every one who has tasted the delights of 
 friendship will respect every social guard which our manners 
 can establish tending to secure us from the intrusion of 
 frivolous and distasteful people. The jealousy of every 
 class to guard itself is a testimony to the reality they have 
 found in life. "When a man once knows that he has done 
 justice to himself, let him dismiss all terrors of aristocracy 
 as superstitious, so far as he is concerned." 
 
 Every mother should put a "social guard" around her 
 home. She can not be too particular as to the acquaint- 
 ances whom her daughters may select as their intimate 
 friends. And she should cultivate politeness. 
 
 " Politeness is the ritual of society, as prayers arc of the 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE, 127 
 
 Church, a school of manners, and a gentle blessing to the 
 age in which it grew." Indeed, some good people classify 
 politeness as one of the seven cardinal virtues. It certainly 
 keeps us from doing many ungracious acts. The good 
 manners of those who have no training must be in native 
 goodness of heart, which is the secret of all true politeness ; 
 but very few people can always trust to that instinct. If 
 they are trained to an habitual politeness, the result is most 
 favorable. It inculcates self-restraint, and, although there 
 may be the vices of a Chesterfield under the polish, the 
 polite person saves the feelings of his intimates, and keeps 
 them from losing their temper at the brutality of bad man- 
 ners. It was sensibly urged by an ouvrier in the French 
 Revolution, that he preferred ^' the tyranny of the aristo- 
 crat to the tyranny of the mob ; for," said he, ^'1 like bet- 
 ter the tramp of a velvet slipper on my foot than the kick 
 of a wooden shoe." 
 
 No creature is all saint and no creature all sinner. A 
 mother, a teacher, a preacher, must remember this, and do 
 the best that can be done to make, out of the people around 
 one, amiable members of society. 
 
 We live in a time of great thoughts, in which much is 
 said and done for the instruction and elevation of mankind. 
 It is the philanthropic age ; the whole sentiment of reform- 
 ing the masses belongs to our day. When we reflect upon 
 how much has been done by men and women like ourselves, 
 we can not despair, but still hope that we may do some- 
 thing toward it ourselves. 
 
 But still it may not be within our power to do more 
 than to make one happy and useful home. Let us remem- 
 ber, if we do that, we have helped to swell the class of the 
 ivell-bred, whom one day we hope may predominate over 
 tlie ill-bred. 
 
 *' Good manners are the shadows of virtues, if not the 
 virtues themselves." *' Company manners," so called, are 
 
128 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 therefore better than no manners at all. They are not as 
 good as home manners, real manners ; but they may work 
 inwardly. We sometimes gain the real virtue which we 
 have only affected. 
 
 Idleness has no place in the model home. Be indefatig- 
 able in labor, and teach your children to work. The ear- 
 nest worker finds opportunity and help everywhere. It is 
 not accident that makes the fortune. It is assiduous pur- 
 pose and work ; and we all know how difficulty and poverty 
 have inspired and made great men. To the idle and lux- 
 urious, opportunity offers nothing. The book is necessary 
 to the eye ; there must be something to take hold of. 
 There is something in industry which is marvelous. It 
 accomplishes the impossible. It may not always make 
 agreeable people at first ; but it usually ends that way. 
 The man of little worth and no industry, he who depends 
 upon others, is apt to be despondent, unhappy, and queru- 
 lous. 
 
 The only class possessing abundant leisure, who have a 
 right to be idle, are the women who are supported by in- 
 dulgent fathers and husbands, or who are rich in their own 
 right ; and it is to this class that we must look for the 
 maintenance of the elegancies of life. They do much to 
 preserve for us a refined tone of society, if they do nothing 
 else. But we must observe that such^ women are seldom 
 idle. The richest woman in New York is the busiest woman. 
 She is never happy unless she is at work. She is doing 
 somethmg for every charity — helping along young artists, 
 raising the poor gifted daughter of poverty to a higher op- 
 portunity, lending her kind hand everywhere. 
 
 Great wealth also brings great responsibilities, and 
 wealthy single women do not often take advantage of their 
 wealth to be idle. It is the very woman or man who ought 
 to work who is apt to be incorrigibly lazy. 
 
 Women should be educated to feel that the single life 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE. 129 
 
 has its duties, pleasures, and rich and ample fulfillment as 
 well as the married. " I have seen my sisters so unhappy 
 in their wedded lives that I shall never marry," said one 
 most attractive woman. ** I believe nothing is so useful or 
 so happy in the present crowded state of the world as a sin- 
 gle life," said another. 
 
 Women in the single life have an enviable opportunity 
 to live out their own individuality, and they find their 
 place in anybody's home if they are good and agi'eeable. 
 But, so long as they are fussy, sentimental, troubled about 
 old love affairs, seeking, after the day for such things has 
 passed, to be considered attractive, affected, and coquettish, 
 then the old maid deserves the reproach which the vulgar 
 have cast upon her. *' It requires a very superior woman 
 to be an old maid," said the most delightful old maid who 
 ever lived. Miss Catharine Sedgwick. 
 
 And now for one long, last, lingering look over all the 
 field which we have swept with our comprehensive broom. 
 
 Home, wherever and whatever it may be, is sacred. It 
 is a place which none of us, the worst of us, wish degraded. 
 Unhappy it may be, sordid it may be, poor it may be, but 
 we do not wish others to speak ill of it. Very few of us 
 wish it broken up, although it may be our sad business to 
 leave it. 
 
 It is an inclosure for which we are willing to make vast 
 sacrifices. It is the one education which has influenced us 
 powerfully for good or evil. What our fathers taught u-^, 
 what our mothers sang to us, we shall never forget. 
 
 The impression we have made upon our children will 
 never pass away. The home we have made — consciously or 
 unconsciously— is the factor in their lives of the greatest 
 importance. 
 
 W^e may have sown the seeds of a positive moral good- 
 ness, to sec the flowers come up, but choked by weeds ; we 
 
130 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 may have studied household education, and have learned 
 the supposed seed-time and harvest of all the virtues, and 
 have sown broadcast the grain of integrity, self-denial, 
 energy, and industry, yet we have reared only idlers, drunk- 
 ards, and selfish voluptuaries as the result of our home- 
 training. The seed-time was ours ; the harvest is the 
 Lord's. We are not told why we sometimes fail in our best 
 efforts, but we know that we do fail. 
 
 We can, therefore, promise no parent success. There are 
 some soils in which plants of virtue will not grow. Nor is 
 character dependent either upon instruction or training. 
 The good son and the bad son grow up by the same fireside. 
 It is the use which each will make of his opportunities 
 which will determine the question. And even the best 
 people must go through deep trials before character is per- 
 fected. To live unselfishly to good aims, to rise above our 
 daily and hourly temptations, to do our duty whether re- 
 warded or not — these are our stepping-stones. 
 
 But, whether destined to be successful or unsuccessful, 
 all people should try to make a home whose influence shall 
 be good. Whether humble or important, our duty remains 
 the same — to make a good home according to our lights. 
 
 We live in an age which has thrown away tradition, yet 
 it will not hurt us to read of the past, with its trainings 
 and teachings, its formal precepts, its stiff manners, its 
 respect for elders, its old-school customs. Let us aim 
 to take for e^r model all that was good in that sort of 
 home. 
 
 Then let us read of the homes which have formed the 
 great and good and useful people of our Pantheon. We 
 may see, as in the case of Mary Eussell Mitford, how a 
 wretched and worthless father developed the most generous 
 and useful of daughters. We may learn in almost all bi- 
 ographies some great lesson of virtue born of trouble. We 
 shall have to accept many a story of worthless children 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE. 131 
 
 who have not been made good by anything ; many worth- 
 less parents who have made their children unhappy ; but 
 we shall occasionally be refreshed by a well-spring of such 
 delightful freshness that we shall have strength given us 
 wherewith to struggle on. 
 
 And character, when fine, is such a very remunerative 
 thing to the mind which needs help ! We almost welcome 
 any suffering if it would make us so strong, noble, true as 
 some people have been. We sometimes look back through 
 our tears, and see what a large place a certain character we 
 have known has filled in the lives of all who knew him. A 
 hard-working country doctor may have been, as we look up 
 his record after death, a Sir Philip Sidney, an Admirable 
 Crichton, a Carlo Borromeo. We remember his mirth, his 
 cheerfulness, his courtesy, his wit, his industry, faithful- 
 ness, and unselfishness. We remember how he came into 
 the sick-room at early morning, bringing flowers with the 
 dew on them for his suffering patient, and we follow him 
 through the years of his beneficent but unrecorded life, 
 saying, ^' This was character.'''' 
 
 So of many a woman unknown to fame, we remember 
 how bravely she met calamity and shame, brought to her 
 by the man who had sworn to love and to protect. We re- 
 member how cheerfully she worked for him and for her 
 children, never losing her faith in human nature, how she 
 w\is capable of seeing others succeed without envy, how 
 pure her heart, how 'equable her temper. We remember 
 how she made home happy, and how pretty and agreeable 
 she was, although her mornings were given to music lessons 
 and her afternoons to drudgery. No one would have sus- 
 pected, as she gathered her lambs about her evening wood 
 fire, that she had been keeping the wolf from the door. 
 This was cTiaracter, 
 
 And we remember the man who all through his life 
 lived under an unjust suspicion to shield a brother or a son. 
 
132 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 We think of the old man to whom came domestic trials of 
 the hardest, yet who never lost his faith. 
 
 We think of the brilliant woman of society, who stuffs 
 her wounds with brocade, and never lets the world see that 
 she bleeds inwardly. She has swallowed her troubles. She 
 can work for that worthless, that drunken son. No one 
 shall know that she does it. It is necessary for the other 
 members of her family that she keep up that home in its 
 supposed splendor. It is only another sleepless year to her ! 
 What does it matter ? This is character. 
 
 So long as men and women remember that home is the 
 anchor of the State, so long will they be doing tlieir duty 
 to themselves, to their country, and to God. 
 
 We have not been able to lay down any definite and 
 unalterable rules. The hours of rising, of retiring, of 
 taking meals, of dressing, receiving company, and of allow- 
 ing either gayety or sobriety to rule the house, this must 
 be left to the sense, taste, and discretion of every house- 
 holder. 
 
 Almost all people of sense agree as to the advantages 
 of early rising and punctuality and economy and general 
 good manners. It may seem very commonplace to even 
 allude to them. It is to that higher instinct which lies 
 behind good reputations to which we would appeal. It is 
 to the sacred sense of the reality of home. It is to the feel- 
 ing that Wordsworth expresses in his well-known lines re- 
 specting those 
 
 " — who never roam, 
 . True to the sacred points of heaven and home." 
 
 Still less have we been able to tell parents, except very 
 generally, what books their children should read. We are 
 very great believers in fairy tales, and think that the nur- 
 sery circle should be entertained by the mother in reading 
 aloud those delightfully fantastic productions of Grimm 
 and others who have explored the world under the fern- 
 
MAKING HOME ATTRACTIVE. 133 
 
 leaves. There is no danger that these stories will make 
 liars of children, as some conscientious people have feared. 
 A child perceives at once the difference between fact and 
 fancy. 
 
 And the fairy stories are as true as ^^ Sandford and Mer- 
 ton" or the "Rollo Books." Let children read both. Let 
 the delicate instruction which filters through " Jack and 
 the Bean-Stalk," "Cinderella," and through the im- 
 mortal pages of the "Arabian Nights," reach a youthful 
 mind early. These books give an elegance and a fullness 
 to the intellect of a child which no practical book can 
 reach. A child is nearer heaven than we are ; he still sees 
 the unseen. 
 
 " And trailing clouds of glory, does lie come 
 From God, who is his home." 
 
 We should remember that his clear and unpolluted mind 
 still revels in dimly remembered wonders, of which we have 
 lost sight, and the universal craving of a child's mind for 
 the wonderful is not to be despised. 
 
 As for the growing man and woman, we can only say : 
 give them good books at first, and they will never wish for 
 any other. Form a taste, and then turn them into a well- 
 selected library. If a little girl comes to her mother and 
 asks, ' ' What shall I read ? " she should always be helped 
 to a good book. But, after her tastes are pronounced, she 
 will read what she likes or will not read at all. 
 
 And we would earnestly urge upon American mothers 
 to go into society with their daughters, to make the great- 
 est effort to be with them, to know well their intimates, to 
 keep young for their daughters' sake. It is very often 
 that, with small means and with young children, a mother 
 finds herself unable to do this thing. Indeed, it is some- 
 times the case that a mother economizes on her own dress 
 
 in order that her daughter may be better dressed, and stays 
 12 
 
134 AMEFITIES OF HOME. 
 
 at home herself to send her daughter. This is a great mis- 
 take. The mother's presence as chaperon to her daughter 
 would have saved us much national scandal. In families 
 of good ancestry, where good manners have been trans- 
 mitted, we find always the mother a prominent feature in 
 society. In families of no antecedents, those who must 
 make a family, certainly this rule should be even more 
 vigorously followed. We would have no reproach of "fast 
 girls" if dignified mothers watched over their daughters' 
 amusements. 
 
 If parents wish their children to be loving, appreciative, 
 and grateful, they should teach them to reverence and to 
 obey. If they wish them to be graceful, accomplished, re- 
 fined, they must surround them with these advantages at 
 home. They must teach them not only those principles of 
 good-breeding which spring from the heart, but they must 
 tell them of the immense force which lies in social good- 
 breeding and in pleasant manners. 
 
 And if we could compress into one golden sentence the 
 nearest approach to a formula for home happiness, it would 
 be this : Be as polite to one another as if all were strangers. 
 Do not let the intimacy of home break down a single bar- 
 rier of self-control. Let every member of the family studi- 
 ously respect the rights — moral, intellectual, and physical 
 — of every other member. Let each one refrain from at- 
 tacking 'the convictions of the other. We should not so 
 treat a stranger. Why our own ? 
 
 " Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace, 
 To silence envious tongues." 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 Subjcets pertaining to Home and the 
 
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 AMENITIES OF HOME. 
 
 IN PREPARATION: 
 
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 HOME STUDIES. 
 
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 The volumes will in some instances be illustrated. 
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 Price, 60 cents each. 
 
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 Large space is given to Literary and Art Themes, to Discussions of 
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 Considerable space is also given to comprehensive and analytical re- 
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ADVERTISEMENTS. 
 
 ALL AROUND THE HOUSE; 
 
 OR, 
 
 HOW TO MAKE HOMES HAPPY. 
 
 BY 
 
 Mrs. HENRY WARD BEECHER, 
 
 Author of "Motherly Talks," etc. 
 
 One volume, 12mo. Cloth. - _ _ Price, $l.SO. 
 
 " This volume consists of the reprint of those social chats with young 
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 ber of receipts. The volume is as sensible and practical within as it is 
 neat and attractive without." — New York Examiner and Chronicle. 
 
 " The book is an encyclopaedia of household information which no woman 
 can read without benefit. It can not fail to be a help to many untaught 
 housekeepers, while the more experienced may find suggestions of value. 
 The volume would be a blessing if it could go into every household and be 
 attentively read." — Chicago Inter- Ocean. 
 
 "She has not lived in vain who has gathered together so much of 
 worldly wisdom, and bequeathed it in such attractive form to those who 
 come after her, treading the dangerous quicksands that beset domestic life 
 in this nervous and electrical age." — San Francisco Evening Post. 
 
 " Every house which has Mrs, Beecher's book will be the happier for 
 it." — Erie (Pa.) Sxtnday Morning Gazette. 
 
 " The book is counselor and cook combined, and a treasure in any 
 house." — Toledo Sunday Journal. 
 
 "No book has appeared among the many issued for the household 
 which combines so many excellences for the promotion of domestic well- 
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 Health and Disease, by Thomas K. Chambers, M. D. 
 Edited by Eliza A. Younians. 
 
 In one vol., 12nno, 382 pages, bound in cloth. Price, $l.SO. 
 
 This is an important work for such American housekeepers as are in- 
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 cooking-schools themselves. 
 
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