introduced.

My wife and I were somewhat advanced housekeepers, and our dwelling was
first furnished by her father, in the old-fashioned jog-trot days, when
furniture was made with a view to its lasting from generation to
generation. Everything was strong and comfortable,--heavy mahogany,
guiltless of the modern device of veneering, and hewed out with a square
solidity which had not an idea of change. It was, so to speak, a sort of
granite foundation of the household structure. Then, we commenced
housekeeping with the full idea that our house was a thing to be lived
in, and that furniture was made to be used. That most sensible of women,
Mrs. Crowfield, agreed fully with me that in our house there was to be
nothing too good for ourselves,--no rooms shut up in holiday attire to
be enjoyed by strangers for three or four days in the year, while we
lived in holes and corners,--no best parlor from which we were to be
excluded,--no best china which we were not to use,--no silver plate to
be kept in the safe in the bank, and brought home only in case of a
grand festival, while our daily meals were served with dingy Britannia.
"Strike a broad, plain average," I said to my wife; "have everything
abundant, serviceable; and give all our friends exactly what we have
ourselves, no better and no worse";--and my wife smiled approval on my
sentiment.

Smile! she did more than smile. My wife resembles one of those convex
mirrors I have sometimes seen. Every idea I threw out, plain and simple,
she reflected back upon me in a thousand little glitters and twinkles of
her own; she made my crude conceptions come back to me in such perfectly
dazzling performances that I hardly recognized them. My mind warms up,
when I think what a home that woman made of our house from the very
first day she moved into it. The great, large, airy parlor, with its
ample bow-window, when she had arranged it, seemed a perfect trap to
catch sunbeams. There was none of that discouraging trimness and newness
that often repel a man's bachelor-friends after the first call, and make
them feel,--"Oh, well, one cannot go in at Crowfield's now, unless one
is dressed; one might put them out." The first thing our parlor said to
any one was, that we were not people to be put out, that we were
wide-spread, easy-going, and jolly folk. Even if Tom Brown brought in
Ponto and his shooting-bag, there was nothing in that parlor to strike
terror into man and dog; for it was written