r to be a parlor dog; but somehow, what
with little beggings and pleadings on the part of Arthur and Tom, and
the piteous melancholy with which Rover would look through the
window-panes when shut out from the blazing warmth into the dark, cold
veranda, it at last came to pass that Rover gained a regular corner at
the hearth, a regular status in every family convocation. And then
came a little black-and-tan English terrier for the girls; and then a
fleecy poodle, who established himself on the corner of my wife's
sofa; and for each of these some little voice pleaded, and some
little heart would be so near broken at any slight that my wife and I
resigned ourselves to live in a menagerie, the more so as we were
obliged to confess a lurking weakness towards these four-footed
children ourselves.

So we grew and flourished together,--children, dogs, birds, flowers,
and all; and although my wife often, in paroxysms of housewifeliness
to which the best of women are subject, would declare that we never
were fit to be seen, yet I comforted her with the reflection that
there were few people whose friends seemed to consider them better
worth seeing, judging by the stream of visitors and loungers which was
always setting towards our parlor. People seemed to find it good to be
there; they said it was somehow home-like and pleasant, and that there
was a kind of charm about it that made it easy to talk and easy to
live; and as my girls and boys grew up, there seemed always to be some
merry doing or other going on there. Arty and Tom brought home their
college friends, who straightway took root there and seemed to fancy
themselves a part of us. We had no reception-rooms apart, where the
girls were to receive young gentlemen; all the courting and flirting
that were to be done had for their arena the ample variety of surface
presented by our parlor, which, with sofas and screens and lounges and
recesses, and writing and work tables, disposed here and there, and
the genuine _laisser aller_ of the whole menage, seemed, on the whole,
to have offered ample advantages enough; for at the time I write of,
two daughters were already established in marriage, while my youngest
was busy, as yet, in performing that little domestic ballet of the cat
with the mouse, in the case of a most submissive youth of the
neighborhood.

All this time our parlor furniture, though of that granitic formation
I have indicated, began to show marks of that decay to w