ur houses. We fill our rooms too
full of all sorts of knick-knacks, so much so that we can hardly move
about for fear of upsetting something. "I have a fire [in my bedroom]
all day," writes Carlyle. "The bed seems to be about eight feet wide. Of
my paces the room measures fifteen from end to end, forty-five feet long,
height and width proportionate, with ancient, dead-looking portraits of
queens, kings, Straffords and principalities, etc., really the
uncomfortablest acme of luxurious comfort that any Diogenes was set into
in these late years." Thoreau's furniture at Walden consisted of a bed,
a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter,
a pair of tongs, a kettle, a frying-pan, a wash-bowl, two knives and
forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for
molasses, and a japanned lamp. There were no ornaments. He writes, "I
had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find
that they required to be dusted daily, and I threw them out of the window
in disgust."

"Our cottage is quite large enough for us, though very small," wrote Miss
Wordsworth, "and we have made it neat and comfortable within doors; and
it looks very nice on the outside, for though the roses and honeysuckle
which we have planted against it are only of this year's growth, yet it
is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet flowers, for we have
trained scarlet beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly
beautiful, but very useful, as their produce is immense. We have made a
lodging room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor,
therefore we have covered it all over with matting. We sit in a room
above stairs, and we have one lodging room with two single beds, a sort
of lumber room, and a small, low, unceiled room, which I have papered
with newspapers, and in which we have put a small bed. Our servant is an
old woman of 60 years of age, whom we took partly out of charity." Here
Miss Wordsworth and her brother, the great poet, lived on the simplest
fare and drank cold water, and hence issued those noble poems which more
than any others teach us the higher life.

"Blush, grandeur, blush; proud courts, withdraw your blaze;
Ye little stars, hide your diminished rays."

"I turned schoolmaster," says Sydney Smith, "to educate my son, as I
could not afford to send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned
schoolmistress to educate my girls as I could not afford a gove