can hire; in fact, when we do hire, we are
discontented and uncomfortable,--for who will do for us what we will do
for ourselves? But when we have company! there's the rub, to get out all
our best things and put them back,--to cook the meals and wash the
dishes ingloriously,--and to make all appear as if we didn't do it, and
had servants like other people.

There, after all, is the rub. A want of hardy self-belief and
self-respect,--an unwillingness to face with dignity the actual facts
and necessities of our situation in life,--this, after all, is the worst
and most dangerous feature of the case. It is the same sort of pride
which makes Smilax think he must hire a waiter in white gloves, and get
up a circuitous dinner-party on English principles, to entertain a
friend from England. Because the friend in England lives in such and
such a style, he must make believe for a day that he lives so too, when
in fact it is a whirlwind in his domestic establishment equal to a
removal or a fire, and threatens the total extinction of Mrs. Smilax.
Now there are two principles of hospitality that people are very apt to
overlook. One is, that their guests like to be made at home, and treated
with confidence; and another is, that people are always interested in
the details of a way of life that is new to them. The Englishman comes
to America as weary of his old, easy, family-coach life as you can be of
yours; he wants to see something new under the sun,--something American;
and forthwith we all bestir ourselves to give him something as near as
we can fancy exactly like what he is already tired of. So city-people
come to the country, not to sit in the best parlor, and to see the
nearest imitation of city-life, but to lie on the hay-mow, to swing in
the barn, to form intimacy with the pigs, chickens, and ducks, and to
eat baked potatoes exactly on the critical moment when they are done,
from the oven of the cooking-stove,--and we remark, _en passant_, that
nobody has ever truly eaten a baked potato, unless he has seized it at
that precise and fortunate moment.

I fancy you now, my friends, whom I have in my eye. You are three happy
women together. You are all so well that you know not how it feels to be
sick. You are used to early rising, and would not lie in bed, if you
could. Long years of practice have made you familiar with the shortest,
neatest, most expeditious method of doing every household office, so
that really for the greater