CHAPTER IX.
MISCELLANEOUS.
OLDTOWN FOLKS.
It takes some hours to get a room warm where a family never sits, and which therefore has not in its walls one particle of the genial vitality which comes from the indwelling of human beings.
When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you, till it seems as if you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that’s just the place and time that the tide ’ll turn.
SAM LAWSON’S STORIES.
“Some seem to think the Lord don’t look out only for gret things; but, ye see, little things is kind o’ hinges that gret ones turns on. They say, take care o’ pennies, an’ dollars’ll take care o’ themselves. It’s jest so in everything; and ef the Lord don’t look arter little things, He ain’t so gret as they say, any way.”
LITTLE FOXES.
Truth before all things; sincerity before all things; pure, clean, diamond-bright sincerity is of more value than the gold of Ophir; the foundation of all love must rest here. How those people do who live in the nearest and dearest intimacy with friends who, they believe, will lie to them for any purpose, even the most refined and delicate, is a mystery to me. If I once know that my wife or my friend will tell me only what they think will be agreeable to me, then I am at once lost, my way is a pathless quicksand. But all this being premised, I still say that we Anglo-Saxons might improve our domestic life, if we would graft upon the strong stock of its homely sincerity the courteous grace of the French character.
Flattery is insincere praise, given from interested motives, not the sincere utterance to a friend of what we deem good and lovely in him.
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
In fact, nobody wanted to stay in our parlor now. It was a cold, correct, accomplished fact; the household fairies had left it,—and when the fairies leave a room, nobody ever feels at home in it. No pictures, curtains, no wealth of mirrors, no elegance of lounges, can in the least make up for their absence. They are a capricious little set; there are rooms where they will not stay, and rooms where they will, but no one can ever have a good time without them.
SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS.
Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt.
Conversation of French circles seems to me like gambols of a thistledown, or the rainbow changes in soap-bubbles. One laughs with tears in one’s eyes. One moment confounded with the absolute childhood of the simplicity, in the next one is a little afraid of the keen edge of the shrewdness.
These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit—what with their beer-drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthy; but ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.
MY WIFE AND I.
Houses have their physiognomy as much as persons. There are commonplace houses, suggestive houses, attractive houses, mysterious houses, and fascinating houses, just as there are all these classes of persons. There are houses whose windows seem to yawn idly—to stare vacantly; there are houses whose windows glower weirdly, and glance at you askance; there are houses, again, whose very doors and windows seem wide open with frank cordiality, which seem to stretch their arms to embrace you, and woo you kindly to come and possess them....
Is not this a species of high art, by which a house, in itself cold and barren, becomes in every part warm and inviting, glowing with suggestion, alive with human tastes and personalities? Wall-paper, paint, furniture, pictures, in the hands of the home artist, are like the tubes of paint, out of which arises, as by inspiration, a picture. It is the woman who combines them into the wonderful creation which we call a home.
When I came home from my office, night after night, and was led in triumph by Eva to view the result of her achievements, I confess I began to remember, with approbation, the old Greek mythology, and no longer to wonder that divine honors had been paid to household goddesses.
LETTERS.
You do like to do good, and live a life worth living, and when you get to heaven you will always want to do exactly the thing by which you can best please the dear Lord. The fashions there in Heaven are set by Him who made himself of no reputation, and came and spent years among poor, ignorant, stupid, wicked people, that He might bring them up to himself,—and I dare say the saints are burning with zeal to be sent on such messages to our world,—I don’t think they “sit on every heavenly hill,” paying compliments to each other, but they are flying hither and thither on messages of mercy to the dark, the desolate, the sorrowful. That’s the way you’ll be when you get there, and spite of all you say about yourself, you’ll get to liking that sort of work more and more here.
I shall be glad when he is in a house of his own,—a man isn’t half a man till he is.
FINIS.