hat men can
furnish houses more artistically than we, and that as professional
cooks they surpass us. It should follow naturally that men, to whose
hearts the stomach is the shortest thoroughfare, would, in a body,
resort to hotels for daily food. There is but one satisfactory
explanation of the unphilosophical fact that the substantial citizen
who, during a domestic interregnum, makes the experiment of three
meals a day for one month at the best restaurant in New York City (and
there are no better anywhere) returns with gladness and singleness of
heart to his own extension-table--and that were I to put the question
"Contract Cookery or Home Cookery?" to the few Johns who deign to
peruse these lines, the acclaim would be--"Better, as everyday fare,
is a broiled beefsteak and a mealy potato at home, than a palatial
hotel and ten courses."

There is individuality in the steak broiled for John's very self, and
sentiment in the pains taken to keep the starch in his potato, and
solid satisfaction in putting one's knees under his own mahogany. The
least romantic of gourmands objects to stirring his appetite into a
common vat with five hundred others. But there is something back of
all this that makes home-fare delicious, when the house mother smiles
across the dish she has sweetened with love and spiced with good-will,
and thus transformed it into a message from her heart to the hearts of
the dear ones to whom she ministers.

John--being of the masculine gender according to a decree of Nature,
and, therefore, irresponsible for the slow pace at which his wits
move--may not be able at once to analyze the odd heartache he feels in
surveying the apartments fitted up by the upholsterer--or to tell you
why they become no longer a tri-syllabled word, but "our rooms,"
within a day after wife and daughters have taken possession of them.
The honest fellow cannot see but that the furniture is the same, and
each article standing in the same place--but the new atmosphere "which
is the old," greets him upon the threshold, and steals into his heart
before he has fairly entered. Anybody could have shaken the stiffness
out of that portiere, and put a low, shaded lamp under the picture he
likes best, and broken up the formal symmetry of the bric-a-brac that
reminded him, although he did not dare confess it, of a china shop,
and set a slender vaselet with one big ragged golden globe of a
chrysanthemum in it here, and over there a bowl of long