-stemmed
roses--(his favorite Bon Silenes, too). But what hireling, O blind and
dear John! would have left a bit of fancy work with the needle
sticking in it, and scissors lying upon it, on the table in library or
smoking room, and put the song you always ask for at twilight upon the
open piano, and, just where you would choose to cast yourself down to
listen, your especial Sleepy Hollow of chair or lounge with the
slumber robe worked last Christmas by loving fingers thrown invitingly
across it?

What professional art could make the vestibule of your house--a rented
cottage, maybe--the gateway to another, and a purer, higher, happier
sphere than the world you shut out with the closing of the front
door? You would never get upon so much as bowing terms with your
better self but for that front door and the latch key which lets you
into the hall brightened by loving smiles, made merry by welcoming
voices.

Talk of the prose of everyday life! When Poetry is hounded from every
other nook of the earth which the Maker of it meant should be one
vast, sublime epic, she will find an inviolable retreat under the
Lares and Penates guarding the ingleside, and crown as priestess
forever the wife and mother who makes and keeps the Home.

It could hardly be otherwise. To no other of his co-workers does the
Lord of life grant such opportunities as to woman. Her baby is laid in
the mother's arms to have, and to hold, and to fashion, without let or
hindrance. His mind and heart are unwritten paper, and Nature and
Providence unite in waving aside all who would interfere with what she
chooses to inscribe thereupon. Her growing boys and girls believe in
her with absoluteness no other friend will ever inspire--not in her
love alone, but in her infallibility and her omnipotence. It is a
moment of terror and often the turning point in a child's life, when
first he comprehends that there are hurts his mother cannot heal,
knowledge which he needs and she cannot impart.

If the boundaries of home seem sometimes to circumscribe a woman's
sphere, they are also a safe barricade within which husband, and the
children who have come to man's estate, find retreat from the outer
storm and stress, a sanctuary where love feeds the flame upon the
domestic altar. There, the atmosphere, like that of St. Peter's
Church, never changes. It refreshes when the breath of the world is a
simoon, withering heart and strength. When the winds of adversity are
bleak