air that is given to a room by being really at
home in it. Not the most skillful arrangement can impart this charm.

"It is said that a king of France once remarked, 'My son, you must
seem to love your people.'

"'Father, how shall I _seem_ to love them?'

"'My son, you _must_ love them.'

"So, to make rooms seem home-like, you must be at home in them. Human
light and warmth are so wanting in some rooms, it is so evident that
they are never used, that you can never be at ease there. In vain the
housemaid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair toward chair; in
vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the
centre-table.

"Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have
really been moved here and there in the animation of social contact,
have a sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people
really live and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a
live woman from a wax image.

"Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this
one grace, that they seem to let you into the home life and home
current. You seem to understand in a moment that you are taken into
the family, and are moving in its inner circles, and not revolving at
a distance in some outer court of the gentiles.

"How many people do we call on from year to year and know no more of
their feelings, habits, tastes, family ideas and ways, than if they
lived in Kamtschatka! And why? Because the room which they call a
front parlor is made expressly so that you never shall know. They sit
in a back room,--work, talk, read, perhaps. After the servant has let
you in and opened a crack of the shutters, and while you sit waiting
for them to change their dress and come in, you speculate as to what
they may be doing. From some distant region, the laugh of a child,
the song of a canary-bird reaches you, and then a door claps hastily
to. Do they love plants? Do they write letters, sew, embroider,
crochet? Do they ever romp and frolic? What books do they read? Do
they sketch or paint? Of all these possibilities the mute and muffled
room says nothing. A sofa and six chairs, two ottomans fresh from the
upholsterer's, a Brussels carpet, a centre-table with four gilt Books
of Beauty on it, a mantel-clock from Paris, and two bronze vases,--all
those tell you only in frigid tones, 'This is the best room,'--only
that, and nothing more,--and soon _she_ trips in in her best clothes,
and apologizes for k