thin the limits of her knowledge and the
capacities of her servants. All plain, good of its kind, unpretending,
without an attempt to do anything English or French,--to do anything
more than if she were furnishing a gala-dinner for her father or
returned brother. Show him your house freely, just as it is, talk to him
freely of it, just as he in England showed you his finer things. If the
man is a true man, he will thank you for such unpretending, sincere
welcome; if he is a man of straw, then he is not worth wasting Mrs.
Smilax's health and spirits for, in unavailing efforts to get up a
foreign dinner-party.

A man who has any heart in him values a genuine little bit of home more
than anything else you can give him. He can get French cooking at a
restaurant; he can buy expensive wines at first-class hotels, if he
wants them; but the traveller, though ever so rich and ever so
well-served at home, is, after all, nothing but a man as you are, and he
is craving something that doesn't seem like a hotel,--some bit of real,
genuine heart-life. Perhaps he would like better than anything to show
you the last photograph of his wife, or to read to you the great,
round-hand letter of his ten-year-old which he has got to-day. He is
ready to cry when he thinks of it. In this mood he goes to see you,
hoping for something like home, and you first receive him in a parlor
opened only on state occasions, and that has been circumstantially and
exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures you, as every other parlor
of the kind in the city is furnished. You treat him to a dinner got up
for the occasion, with hired waiters,--a dinner which it has taken Mrs.
Smilax a week to prepare for, and will take her a week to recover
from,--for which the baby has been snubbed and turned off, to his loud
indignation, and your young four-year-old sent to his aunts. Your
traveller eats your dinner, and finds it inferior, as a work of art, to
other dinners,--a poor imitation. He goes away and criticizes; you hear
of it, and resolve never to invite a foreigner again. But if you had
given him a little of your heart, a little home-warmth and feeling,--if
you had shown him your baby, and let him romp with your four-year-old,
and eat a genuine dinner with you,--would he have been false to that?
Not so likely. He wanted something real and human,--you gave him a bad
dress-rehearsal, and dress-rehearsals always provoke criticism.

Besides hospitality, there is, in