and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own
character and taste. But we have fallen into the days of conformity. It
is no wonder that people constantly go into their neighbors' houses by
mistake, just as, in spite of the Maine law, they wear away each other's
hats from an evening party. It has almost come to this, that you might
as well be anybody else as yourself.

Am I mistaken in supposing that this is owing to the discontinuance of
big chimneys, with wide fireplaces in them? How can a person be attached
to a house that has no center of attraction, no soul in it, in the
visible form of a glowing fire, and a warm chimney, like the heart in
the body? When you think of the old homestead, if you ever do, your
thoughts go straight to the wide chimney and its burning logs. No wonder
that you are ready to move from one fireplaceless house into another.
But you have something just as good, you say. Yes, I have heard of
it. This age, which imitates everything, even to the virtues of
our ancestors, has invented a fireplace, with artificial, iron, or
composition logs in it, hacked and painted, in which gas is burned, so
that it has the appearance of a wood-fire. This seems to me blasphemy.
Do you think a cat would lie down before it? Can you poke it? If
you can't poke it, it is a fraud. To poke a wood-fire is more solid
enjoyment than almost anything else in the world. The crowning human
virtue in a man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do not know how any
virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gas-log. What a sense of
insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of
gathering about it. With this center of untruthfulness, what must the
life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of
ten thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother,
more beautiful and younger than her beautified daughters, will rouge;
perhaps the young ladies will make wax-work. A cynic might suggest
as the motto of modern life this simple legend,--"just as good as
the real." But I am not a cynic, and I hope for the rekindling of
wood-fires, and a return of the beautiful home light from them. If
a wood-fire is a luxury, it is cheaper than many in which we indulge
without thought, and cheaper than the visits of a doctor, made necessary
by the want of ventilation of the house. Not that I have anything
against doctors; I only wish, after they have been to see us in a way
tha