If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.——, who writes to all her friends boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies, for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still more exacting and unreasonable.

The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goes expecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they should have. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and a bell to ring for both. What experienced country boarder has not laughed in his sleeve to see such an one, newly arrived, putting his head out snappingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to chance passers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this house?"

If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of the finest flavor, and never boiled; that steaks will be porter-house steaks; that green peas will be in plenty; and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for the summer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, ten to one, could put her to the blush in five minutes by superior knowledge on many subjects, will enter and leave her room and wait upon her at the table with the silent respectfulness of a trained city servant.

This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end of every summer hundreds of disappointed city people go back to their homes grumbling about country food and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouraged wives of country landlords sit down in their houses, at last emptied, and vow a vow that never again will they take "city folks to board." But the great law of supply and demand is too strong for them. The city must come out of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for its lungs, sunlight for its eyes, and rest for its overworked brain. The country must open its arms, whether it will or not, and share its blessings. And so the summers and the summerings go on, and there are always to be heard in the land the voices of murmuring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindicating. We confess that our sympathies are with the landlords. The average country landlord is an honest, well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to be made "off boarders" is so moderate and simple that the keepers of city boarding-houses would laugh it and him to scorn. If this were not so, would he be found undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or a dollar and a half a day? Neither does he dream of asking them, even at this low price, to fare as he fares. The "Excelsior" mattresses, at which they cry out in disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw "tick" on which he and his wife sleep soundly and contentedly. He has paid $4.50 for each mattress, as a special concession to what he understands city prejudice to require. The cheap painted chamber-sets are holiday adorning by the side of the cherry and pine in the bedrooms of his family. He buys fresh meat every day for dinner; and nobody can understand the importance of this fact who is not familiar with the habit of salt-pork and codfish in our rural districts. That the meat is tough, pale, stringy is not his fault; no other is to be bought. Stetson, himself, if he dealt with this country butcher, could do no better. Vegetables? Yes, he has planted them. If we look out of our windows, we can see them on their winding way. They will be ripe by and by. He never tasted peas in his life before the Fourth of July, or cucumbers before the middle of August. He hears that there are such things; but he thinks they must be "dreadful unhealthy, them things forced out of season,"—and, whether healthy or not, he can't get them. We couldn't ourselves, if we were keeping house in the same township. To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, and be served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterly unfit to be eaten at end of their day's journey, costing double their market price in the added express charge. We should not do any such thing. We should do just as he does, make the best of "plum sauce," or even dried apples. We should not make our sauce with molasses, probably; but he does not know that sugar is better; he honestly likes molasses best. As for saleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and ubiquitous pickles,—all those things have he, and his fathers before him, eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial. He will listen incredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change of fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c.; for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he may be too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and his wife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while ours must lie down and rest by noon. In spite of all this, he will do what he can to humor our whims. Never yet have we seen the country boarding-house where kindly and persistent remonstrance would not introduce the gridiron and banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt at yeast-bread. Good, patient, long-suffering country people! The only wonder to us is that they tolerate so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, the preferences and prejudices of city men and women, who come and who remain strangers among them; and who, in so many instances, behave from first to last as if they were of a different race, and knew nothing of any common bonds of humanity and Christianity.



The Good Staff of Pleasure.



In an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined every day for three weeks, one summer, I made the acquaintance of a little maid called Gretchen. She stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark passageway which communicated in some mysterious fashion with cellar, kitchen, dining-room, and main hall of the inn. From one or other of these quarters Gretchen was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know how she contrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate in the course of the day. Poor child! I am afraid she did most of her work after dark; for I sometimes left her standing there at ten o'clock at night. She was blanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sunlight. I doubt if ever, unless perhaps on some exceptional Sunday, she knew the sensation of a full breath of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face.

But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there was never-failing good-cheer in her voice when she said "Good-morning." Her uniform atmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, I said to Franz, the head waiter,—

"What makes Gretchen so happy? She has a hard life, always standing in that narrow dark place, washing dishes."

Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged his shoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen's life was a hard one, and added,—

"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her door. There will be no one which will say not nothing if they go by."

That was it. Almost every hour some human voice said pleasantly to her, "Good-morning, Gretchen," or "It is a fine day;" or, if no word were spoken, there would be a friendly nod and smile. For nowhere in kind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pass by other human beings, as we do in America, without so much as a turn of the head to show recognition of humanity in common.

This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, but comparatively glad. Her body suffered for want of sun and air. There was no helping that, by any amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must stand, year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, and do hard drudgery. But, if she had stood in that close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, and had had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been dead in three months.

If all men and women could realize the power, the might of even a small pleasure, how much happier the world would be! and how much longer bodies and souls both would bear up under living! Sensitive people realize it to the very core of their being. They know that often and often it happens to them to be revived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they could not describe, and which they hardly comprehend, by some little thing,—some word of praise, some token of remembrance, some proof of affection or recognition. They know, too, that strength goes out of them, just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, perhaps even a short space, all these are wanting.

People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they are tender. They are by no means inseparable,—tenderness and sensitiveness; if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and more agreeable. But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; living in close relations with them, they learn what they need, and, so far as they can, supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps grow a little weary.

We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing because one over-sensitive child must be so much more gently restrained or admonished than the rest. But she has her reward for every effort to adjust her methods to the instrument she does not quite understand. If she doubts this, she has only to look on the right hand and the left, and see the effect of careless, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive natures.

We see, also, many men,—good, generous, kindly, but not sensitive-souled,—who have learned that the sunshine of their homes all depends on little things, which it would never have entered into their busy and composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or providing, if they had not discovered that without them their wives droop, and with them they keep well.

People who are neither tender nor sensitive can neither comprehend nor meet these needs. Alas! that there are so many such people; or that, if there must be just so many, as I suppose there must, they are not distinguishable at first sight, by some mark of color, or shape, or sound, so that one might avoid them, or at least know what to expect in entering into relation with them. Woe be to any sensitive soul whose life must, in spite of itself, take tone and tint from daily and intimate intercourse with such! No bravery, no philosophy, no patience can save it from a slow death. But, while the subtlest and most stimulating pleasures which the soul knows come to it through its affections, and are, therefore, so to speak, at every man's mercy, there is still left a world of possibility of enjoyment, to which we can help ourselves, and which no man can hinder.

And just here it is, I think, that many persons, especially those who are hard-worked, and those who have some special trouble to bear, make great mistake. They might, perhaps, say at hasty first sight that it would be selfish to aim at providing themselves with pleasures. Not at all. Not one whit more than it is for them to buy a bottle of Ayer's Sarsaparilla (if they do not know better) to "cleanse their blood" in the spring! Probably a dollar's worth of almost any thing out of any other shop than a druggist's would "cleanse their blood" better,—a geranium, for instance, or a photograph, or a concert, or a book, or even fried oysters,—any thing, no matter what, so it is innocent, which gives them a little pleasure, breaks in on the monotony of their work or their trouble, and makes them have for one half-hour a "good time." Those who have near and dear ones to remember these things for them need no such words as I am writing here. Heaven forgive them if, being thus blessed, they do not thank God daily and take courage.

But lonely people, and people whose kin are not kind or wise in these things, must learn to minister even in such ways to themselves. It is not selfish. It is not foolish. It is wise. It is generous. Each contented look on a human face is reflected in every other human face which sees it; each growth in a human soul is a blessing to every other human soul which comes in contact with it.

Here will come in, for many people, the bitter restrictions of poverty. There are so many men and women to whom it would seem simply a taunt to advise them to spend, now and then, a dollar for a pleasure. That the poor must go cold and hungry has never seemed to me the hardest feature in their lot; there are worse deprivations than that of food or raiment, and this very thing is one of them. This is a point for charitable people to remember, even more than they do.

We appreciate this when we give some plum-pudding and turkey at Christmas, instead of all coal and flannel. But, any day in the year, a picture on the wall might perhaps be as comforting as a blanket on the bed; and, at any rate, would be good for twelve months, while the blanket would help but six. I have seen an Irish mother, in a mud hovel, turn red with delight at a rattle for her baby, when I am quite sure she would have been indifferently grateful for a pair of socks.

Food and physicians and money are and always will be on the earth. But a "merry heart" is a "continual feast," and "doeth good like-a medicine;" and "loving favor" is "chosen," "rather than gold and silver."



Wanted.—A Home.



Nothing can be meaner than that "Misery should love company." But the proverb is founded on an original principle in human nature, which it is no use to deny and hard work to conquer. I have been uneasily conscious of this sneaking sin in my own soul, as I have read article after article in the English newspapers and magazines on the "decadence of the home spirit in English family life, as seen in the large towns and the metropolis." It seems that the English are as badly off as we. There, also, men are wide-awake and gay at clubs and races, and sleepy and morose in their own houses; "sons lead lives independent of their fathers and apart from their sisters and mothers;" "girls run about as they please, without care or guidance." This state of things is "a spreading social evil," and men are at their wit's end to know what is to be done about it. They are ransacking "national character and customs, religion, and the particular tendency of the present literary and scientific thought, and the teaching and preaching of the public press," to find out the root of the trouble. One writer ascribes it to the "exceeding restlessness and the desire to be doing something which are predominant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxon race;" another to the passion which almost all families have for seeming richer and more fashionable than their means will allow. In these, and in most of their other theories, they are only working round and round, as doctors so often do, in the dreary circle of symptomatic results, without so much as touching or perhaps suspecting their real centre. How many people are blistered for spinal disease, or blanketed for rheumatism, when the real trouble is a little fiery spot of inflammation in the lining of the stomach! and all these difficulties in the outworks are merely the creaking of the machinery, because the central engine does not work properly. Blisters and blankets may go on for seventy years coddling the poor victim; but he will stay ill to the last if his stomach be not set right.

There is a close likeness between the doctor's high-sounding list of remote symptoms, which he is treating as primary diseases, and the hue and outcry about the decadence of the home spirit, the prevalence of excessive and improper amusements, club-houses, billiard-rooms, theatres, and so forth, which are "the banes of homes."

The trouble is in the homes. Homes are stupid, homes are dreary, homes are insufferable. If one can be pardoned for the Irishism of such a saying, homes are their own worst "banes." If homes were what they should be, nothing under heaven could be invented which could be bane to them, which would do more than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer, their pleasanter ways, their wholesomer joys.

Whose fault is it that they are not so? Fault is a heavy word. It includes generations in its pitiless entail. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof is but one side of the truth. No day is sufficient unto the evil thereof is the other. Each day has to bear burdens passed down from so many other days; each person has to bear burdens so complicated, so interwoven with the burdens of others; each person's fault is so fevered and swollen by faults of others, that there is no disentangling the question of responsibility. Every thing is everybody's fault is the simplest and fairest way of putting it. It is everybody's fault that the average home is stupid, dreary, insufferable,—a place from which fathers fly to clubs, boys and girls to streets. But when we ask who can do most to remedy this,—in whose hands it most lies to fight the fight against the tendencies to monotony, stupidity, and instability which are inherent in human nature,—then the answer is clear and loud. It is the work of women; this is the true mission of women, their "right" divine and unquestionable, and including most emphatically the "right to labor."

To create and sustain the atmosphere of a home,—it is easily said in a very few words; but how many women have done it? How many women can say to themselves or others that this is their aim? To keep house well women often say they desire. But keeping house well is another affair,—I had almost said it has nothing to do with creating a home. That is not true, of course; comfortable living, as regards food and fire and clothes, can do much to help on a home. Nevertheless, with one exception, the best homes I have ever seen were in houses which were not especially well kept; and the very worst I have ever known were presided (I mean tyrannized) over by "perfect housekeepers."

All creators are single-aimed. Never will the painter, sculptor, writer lose sight of his art. Even in the intervals of rest and diversion which are necessary to his health and growth, every thing he sees ministers to his passion. Consciously or unconsciously, he makes each shape, color, incident his own; sooner or later it will enter into his work.

So it must be with the woman who will create a home. There is an evil fashion of speech which says it is a narrowing and narrow life that a woman leads who cares only, works only for her husband and children; that a higher, more imperative thing is that she herself be developed to her utmost. Even so clear and strong a writer as Frances Cobbe, in her otherwise admirable essay on the "Final Cause of Woman," falls into this shallowness of words, and speaks of women who live solely for their families as "adjectives."

In the family relation so many women are nothing more, so many women become even less, that human conception may perhaps be forgiven for losing sight of the truth, the ideal. Yet in women it is hard to forgive it. Thinking clearly, she should see that a creator can never be an adjective; and that a woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator, second only to God.

Before she can do this, she must have development; in and by the doing of this comes constant development; the higher her development, the more perfect her work; the instant her own development is arrested, her creative power stops. All science, all art, all religion, all experience of life, all knowledge of men—will help her; the stars in their courses can be won to fight for her. Could she attain the utmost of knowledge, could she have all possible human genius, it would be none too much. Reverence holds its breath and goes softly, perceiving what it is in this woman's power to do; with what divine patience, steadfastness, and inspiration she must work.

Into the home she will create, monotony, stupidity, antagonisms cannot come. Her foresight will provide occupations and amusements; her loving and alert diplomacy will fend off disputes. Unconsciously, every member of her family will be as clay in her hands. More anxiously than any statesman will she meditate on the wisdom of each measure, the bearing of each word. The least possible governing which is compatible with order will be her first principle; her second, the greatest possible influence which is compatible with the growth of individuality. Will the woman whose brain and heart are working these problems, as applied to a household, be an adjective? be idle?

She will be no more an adjective than the sun is an adjective in the solar system; no more idle than Nature is idle. She will be perplexed; she will be weary; she will be disheartened, sometimes. All creators, save One, have known these pains and grown strong by them. But she will never withdraw her hand for one instant. Delays and failures will only set her to casting about for new instrumentalities. She will press all things into her service. She will master sciences, that her boys' evenings need not be dull. She will be worldly wise, and render to Caesar his dues, that her husband and daughters may have her by their side in all their pleasures. She will invent, she will surprise, she will forestall, she will remember, she will laugh, she will listen, she will be young, she will be old, and she will be three times loving, loving, loving.

This is too hard? There is the house to be kept? And there are poverty and sickness, and there is not time?

Yes, it is hard. And there is the house to be kept; and there are poverty and sickness; but, God be praised, there is time. A minute is time. In one minute may live the essence of all. I have seen a beggar-woman make half an hour of home on a doorstep, with a basket of broken meat! And the most perfect home I ever saw was in a little house into the sweet incense of whose fires went no costly things. A thousand dollars served for a year's living of father, mother, and three children. But the mother was a creator of a home; her relation with her children was the most beautiful I have ever seen; even a dull and commonplace man was lifted up and enabled to do good work for souls, by the atmosphere which this woman created; every inmate of her house involuntarily looked into her face for the key-note of the day; and it always rang clear. From the rose-bud or clover-leaf which, in spite of her hard housework, she always found time to put by our plates at breakfast, down to the essay or story she had on hand to be read or discussed in the evening, there was no intermission of her influence. She has always been and always will be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker. If to her quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been added the appliances of wealth and the enlargements of a wider culture, hers would have been absolutely the ideal home. As it was, it was the best I have ever seen. It is more than twenty years since I crossed its threshold. I do not know whether she is living or not. But, as I see house after house in which fathers and mothers and children are dragging out their lives in a hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleasant collision, I always think with a sigh of that poor little cottage by the seashore, and of the woman who was "the light thereof;" and I find in the faces of many men and children, as plainly written and as sad to see as in the newspaper columns of "Personals," "Wanted,—a home."

THE END