and airiest rooms in the house be
the children's nursery. It is good philosophy, too, to furnish it
attractively, even if the sum expended lower the standard of parlor
luxuries. It is well that the children's chamber, which is to act
constantly on their impressible natures for years, should command a
better prospect, a sunnier aspect, than one which serves for a day's
occupancy of the transient guest. It is well that journeys should be
made or put off in view of the interests of the children; that guests
should be invited with a view to their improvement; that some
intimacies should be chosen and some rejected on their account. But it
is not well that all this should, from infancy, be daily talked out
before the child, and he grow up in egotism from moving in a sphere
where everything from first to last is calculated and arranged with
reference to himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect
combined with real care and never ceasing watchfulness has often
seemed to do wonders in this work of setting human beings on their own
feet for the life journey.

Education is the highest object of home, but education in the widest
sense,--education of the parents no less than of the children. In a
true home the man and the woman receive, through their cares, their
watchings, their hospitality, their charity, the last and highest
finish that earth can put upon them. From that they must pass upward,
for earth can teach them no more.

The home education is incomplete unless it include the idea of
hospitality and charity. Hospitality is a Biblical and apostolic
virtue, and not so often recommended in Holy Writ without reason.
Hospitality is much neglected in America for the very reasons touched
upon above. We have received our ideas of propriety and elegance of
living from old countries, where labor is cheap, where domestic
service is a well-understood, permanent occupation, adopted cheerfully
for life, and where of course there is such a subdivision of labor as
insures great thoroughness in all its branches. We are ashamed or
afraid to conform honestly and hardily to a state of things purely
American. We have not yet accomplished what our friend the Doctor
calls "our weaning," and learned that dinners with circuitous courses
and divers other Continental and English refinements, well enough in
their way, cannot be accomplished in families with two or three
untrained servants, without an expense of care and anxiety which makes