house there was to be nothing too good for ourselves,--no room shut up
in holiday attire to be enjoyed by strangers for three or four days in
the year, while we lived in holes and corners; no best parlor from
which we were to be excluded; no silver plate to be kept in the safe
in the bank, and brought home only in case of a grand festival, while
our daily meals were served with dingy Britannia. "Strike a broad,
plain average," I said to my wife; "have everything abundant,
serviceable, and give all our friends exactly what we have ourselves,
no better and no worse;" and my wife smiled approval on my sentiment.

Smile? she did more than smile. My wife resembles one of those convex
mirrors I have sometimes seen. Every idea I threw out, plain and
simple, she reflected back upon me in a thousand little glitters and
twinkles of her own; she made my crude conceptions come back to me in
such perfectly dazzling performances that I hardly recognized them. My
mind warms up when I think what a home that woman made of our house
from the very first day she moved into it. The great, large, airy
parlor, with its ample bow-window, when she had arranged it, seemed a
perfect trap to catch sunbeams. There was none of that discouraging
trimness and newness that often repel a man's bachelor friends after
the first call, and make them feel, "Oh, well, one cannot go in at
Crowfield's now, unless one is dressed; one might put them out." The
first thing our parlor said to any one was, that we were not people to
be put out, that we were widespread, easy-going, and jolly folk. Even
if Tom Brown brought in Ponto and his shooting-bag, there was nothing
in that parlor to strike terror into man and dog; for it was written
on the face of things that everybody there was to do just as he or she
pleased. There were my books and my writing-table spread out with all
its miscellaneous confusion of papers on one side of the fireplace,
and there were my wife's great, ample sofa and work-table on the
other; there I wrote my articles for the "North American;" and there
she turned and ripped and altered her dresses; and there lay crochet
and knitting and embroidery side by side with a weekly basket of
family mending, and in neighborly contiguity with the last book of the
season, which my wife turned over as she took her after-dinner lounge
on the sofa. And in the bow-window were canaries always singing, and a
great stand of plants always fresh and blooming, and iv