153
XI. Our House 182
XII. Home Religion 212

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER
I. What will You do with Her? or, The Woman Question 231
II. Woman's Sphere 249
III. A Family Talk on Reconstruction 274
IV. Is Woman a Worker? 300
V. The Transition 316
VI. Bodily Religion: A Sermon on Good Health 330
VII. How shall we entertain our Company? 347
VIII. How shall we be Amused? 362
IX. Dress, or Who makes the Fashions 374
X. What are the Sources of Beauty in Dress? 395
XI. The Cathedral 412
XII. The New Year 425
XIII. The Noble Army of Martyrs 438

OUR SECOND GIRL 449

A SCHOLAR'S ADVENTURES IN THE COUNTRY 473

TRIALS OF A HOUSEKEEPER 487

The frontispiece is from a photograph of Mrs. Stowe taken in 1884. The
vignette of Mrs. Stowe's later Hartford home is from a drawing by
Charles Copeland.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Mrs. Stowe had early and very practical acquaintance with the art of
housekeeping. It strikes one at first as a little incongruous that an
author who devoted her great powers to stirring the conscience of a
nation should from time to time, and at one period especially, give
her mind to the ordering of family life, but a moment's consideration
will show that the same woman was earnestly at the bottom of each
effort. In a letter to the late Lord Denman, written in 1853, Mrs.
Stowe, speaking of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, said: "I wrote what I did
because, as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and heartbroken with
the sorrows and injustice which I saw, and because, as a Christian, I
felt the dishonor to Christianity." Not under the stress of passionate
emotion, yet largely from a sense of real responsibility as a woman, a
mother, and a Christian, she occupied herself with those concerns of
every-day life which so distinctly appeal to a