moods, put on a fresh
clear stick of hickory, of that species denominated shagbark, which is
full of most charming slivers, burning with such a clear flame, and
emitting such a delicious perfume in burning, that I would not change
it with the millionaire who kept up his fire with cinnamon.

You must know, my dear Mr. Atlantic, and you, my confidential friends
of the reading public, that there is a certain magic or spiritualism
which I have the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue
of which my wife and daughters never hear or see the little
personalities respecting them which form parts of my papers. By a
peculiar arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand
and the familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls on
their eyes and ears when I am reading, or when they read the parts
personal to themselves; otherwise their sense of feminine propriety
would be shocked at the free way in which they and their most internal
affairs are confidentially spoken of between me and you, O loving
readers.

Thus, in an undertone, I tell you that my little Jenny, as she is
zealously and systematically arranging the fire, and trimly whisking
every untidy particle of ashes from the hearth, shows in every
movement of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the knowing,
observing glance of her eye, and in all her energetic movements, that
her small person is endued and made up of the very expressed essence
of housewifeliness,--she is the very attar, not of roses, but of
housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness are a nature to her;
she is as dainty and delicate in her person as a white cat, as
everlastingly busy as a bee; and all the most needful faculties of
time, weight, measure, and proportion ought to be fully developed in
her skull, if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides all this, she
has a sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which
my fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just
a little sharp grating, if they are not well put. In fact, this kind
of woman needs carefully to be idealized in the process of education,
or she will stiffen and dry, as she grows old, into a veritable
household Pharisee, a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained
in artistic values and artistic weights and measures, to study all the
arts and sciences of the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most
useful, most needful, these little women: they hav