and engravings on the walls. Of all things, I
dislike a room that seems to be kept, like a restaurant, merely to eat
in. I like to see in a dining-room something that betokens a pleasant
sitting-room at other hours. I like there some books, a comfortable
sofa or lounge, and all that should make it cosy and inviting. The
custom in some families, of adopting for the daily meals one of the
two parlors which a city house furnishes, has often seemed to me a
particularly happy one. You take your meals, then, in an agreeable
place, surrounded by the little pleasant arrangements of your daily
sitting-room; and after the meal, if the lady of the house does the
honors of her own pretty china herself, the office may be a pleasant
and social one.

"But in regard to your table-service I have my advice at hand. Invest
in pretty table-linen, in delicate napkins, have your vase of flowers,
and be guided by the eye of taste in the choice and arrangement of
even the every-day table articles, and have no ugly things when you
can have pretty ones by taking a little thought. If you are sore
tempted with lovely china and crystal, too fragile to last, too
expensive to be renewed, turn away to a print-shop and comfort
yourself by hanging around the walls of your dining-room beauty that
will not break or fade, that will meet your eye from year to year,
though plates, tumblers, and teasets successively vanish. There is my
advice for you, Marianne."

At the same time let me say, in parenthesis, that my wife, whose
weakness is china, informed me that night, when we were by ourselves,
that she was ordering secretly a teaset as a bridal gift for Marianne
every cup of which was to be exquisitely painted with the wild flowers
of America, from designs of her own,--a thing, by the by, that can now
be very nicely executed in our country, as one may find by looking in
at our friend Briggs's on School Street. "It will last her all her
life," she said, "and always be such a pleasure to look at; and a
pretty tea-table is such a pretty sight!" So spoke Mrs. Crowfield,
"unweaned from china by a thousand falls." She spoke even with tears
in her eyes. Verily these women are harps of a thousand strings!

But to return to my subject.

"Finally and lastly," I said, "in my analysis and explication of the
agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the growing grace,--their
_homeliness_. By 'homeliness' I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt
to be used, but the