two, a cook and
chambermaid, who divide the functions of his establishment between
them. What shall he do? Let him say, in a fair, manly way, "My dear
fellow, I'm delighted to see you. I live in a small way, but I'll do
my best for you, and Mrs. Smilax will be delighted. Come and dine with
us, so and so, and we'll bring in one or two friends." So the man
comes, and Mrs. Smilax serves up such a dinner as lies within the
limits of her knowledge and the capacities of her servants. All plain,
good of its kind, unpretending, without an attempt to do anything
English or French,--to do anything more than if she were furnishing a
gala dinner for her father or returned brother. Show him your house
freely, just as it is, talk to him freely of it, just as he in England
showed you his larger house and talked to you of his finer things. If
the man is a true man, he will thank you for such unpretending,
sincere welcome; if he is a man of straw, then he is not worth wasting
Mrs. Smilax's health and spirits for, in unavailing efforts to get up
a foreign dinner-party.

A man who has any heart in him values a genuine, little bit of home
more than anything else you can give him. He can get French cooking
at a restaurant; he can buy expensive wines at first-class hotels, if
he wants them; but the traveler, though ever so rich and ever so
well-served at home, is, after all, nothing but a man as you are, and
he is craving something that doesn't seem like an hotel,--some bit
of real, genuine heart life. Perhaps he would like better than
anything to show you the last photograph of his wife, or to read to
you the great, round-hand letter of his ten-year-old which he has got
to-day. He is ready to cry when he thinks of it. In this mood he goes
to see you, hoping for something like, home, and you first receive
him in a parlor opened only on state occasions, and that has been
circumstantially and exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures
you, as every other parlor of the kind in the city is furnished.
You treat him to a dinner got up for the occasion, with hired
waiters,--a dinner which it has taken Mrs. Smilax a week to prepare
for, and will take her a week to recover from,--for which the baby has
been snubbed and turned off, to his loud indignation, and your young
four-year-old sent to his aunts. Your traveler eats your dinner, and
finds it inferior, as a work of art, to other dinners,--a poor
imitation. He goes away and criticises; you hea