r
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 practise line-drawing with a pin on varnished furniture. Still
it is essential that the family-parlors be not too fine for the family
to sit in,--too fine for the ordinary accidents, haps and mishaps, of
reasonably well-trained children. The elegance of the parlor where papa
and mamma sit and receive their friends should wear an inviting, not a
hostile and bristling, aspect to little people. Its beauty and its order
gradually form in the little mind a love of beauty and order, and the
insensibl