ot
cleaned, shut up, and darkened? Have we not shivered with cold, all
the glowering, gloomy month of May, because, the august front parlor
having undergone the spring cleaning, the andirons were snugly tied
up in the tissue-paper, and an elegant frill of the same material
was trembling before the mouth of the once glowing fireplace? Even so,
dear soul, full of loving-kindness and hospitality as thou wast, yet
ever making our house seem like a tomb! And with what patience
wouldst thou sit sewing by a crack in the shutters an inch wide,
rejoicing in thy immaculate paint and clear glass! But was there
ever a thing of thy spotless and unsullied belongings which a boy
might use? How I trembled to touch thy scoured tins, that hung in
appalling brightness! with what awe I asked for a basket to pick
strawberries! and where in the house could I find a place to eat a
piece of gingerbread? How like a ruffian, a Tartar, a pirate, I
always felt when I entered thy domains! and how, from day to day,
I wondered at the immeasurable depths of depravity which were always
leading me to upset something, or break or tear or derange something,
in thy exquisitely kept premises! Somehow the impression was burned
with overpowering force into my mind that houses and furniture,
scrubbed floors, white curtains, bright tins and brasses, were the
great, awful, permanent facts of existence; and that men and women,
and particularly children, were the meddlesome intruders upon this
divine order, every trace of whose intermeddling must be scrubbed
out and obliterated in the quickest way possible. It seemed evident
to me that houses would be far more perfect if nobody lived in them at
all, but that, as men had really and absurdly taken to living in
them, they must live as little as possible. My only idea of a house
was a place full of traps and pitfalls for boys, a deadly temptation
to sins which beset one every moment; and when I read about a
sailor's free life on the ocean, I felt an untold longing to go forth
and be free in like manner.

But a truce to these fancies, and back again to our essay.

If liberty in a house is a comfort to a husband, it is a necessity to
children. When we say liberty, we do not mean license. We do not mean
that Master Johnny be allowed to handle elegant volumes with
bread-and-butter fingers, or that little Miss be suffered to drum on
the piano, or practice line-drawing with a pin on varnished furniture.
Still it is essen