r side in all their pleasures.
She will invent, she will surprise, she will forestall, she will remember,
she will laugh, she will listen, she will be young, she will be old, and
she will be three times loving, loving, loving.

This is too hard? There is the house to be kept? And there are poverty and
sickness, and there is not time?

Yes, it is hard. And there is the house to be kept; and there are poverty
and sickness; but, God be praised, there is time. A minute is time. In one
minute may live the essence of all. I have seen a beggar-woman make half
an hour of home on a doorstep, with a basket of broken meat! And the most
perfect home I ever saw was in a little house into the sweet incense of
whose fires went no costly things. A thousand dollars served for a year's
living of father, mother, and three children. But the mother was a creator
of a home; her relation with her children was the most beautiful I have
ever seen; even a dull and commonplace man was lifted up and enabled to
do good work for souls, by the atmosphere which this woman created; every
inmate of her house involuntarily looked into her face for the key-note of
the day; and it always rang clear. From the rose-bud or clover-leaf which,
in spite of her hard housework, she always found time to put by our plates
at breakfast, down to the essay or story she had on hand to be read or
discussed in the evening, there was no intermission of her influence. She
has always been and always will be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker.
If to her quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been added the
appliances of wealth and the enlargements of a wider culture, hers would
have been absolutely the ideal home. As it was, it was the best I have
ever seen. It is more than twenty years since I crossed its threshold. I
do not know whether she is living or not. But, as I see house after house
in which fathers and mothers and children are dragging out their lives in
a hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleasant collision, I
always think with a sigh of that poor little cottage by the seashore, and
of the woman who was "the light thereof;" and I find in the faces of many
men and children, as plainly written and as sad to see as in the newspaper
columns of "Personals," "Wanted,--a home."

End of Project Gutenberg's Bits About Home Matters, by Helen Hunt Jackson

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BITS ABOUT HOME MATTERS ***

***** This