When I come home in the evenings, between eight and nine o’clock, Anton is always sifting in front of the door, resting his head against the wall.  This is his recreation, his one blessed hour of out-door air and rest.  He stands with his cap in his hand while I pass, and his face shines as if all the concentrated enjoyment of my walk in the woods had descended upon him in my first look.  If I give him a bunch of ferns to add to his nasturtiums and pinks, he is so grateful and delighted that I have to go into the house quickly for fear I shall cry.  Whenever I am coming back from a drive, I begin to think, long before I reach the house, how glad Anton will look when he sees the carriage stop.  I am as sure as if I had omniscient sight into the depths of his good heart that he has distinct and unenvious joy in every pleasure that he sees other people taking.

Never have I, heard one angry or hasty word, one petulant or weary cry from the rooms in which this father and mother and six children are struggling to live.  All day long the barefooted and ragged little ones play under my south windows, and do not quarrel.  I amuse myself by dropping grapes or plums on their heads, and then watching them at their feast; never have I seen them dispute or struggle in the division.  Once I purposely threw a large bunch of grapes to the poor little mute, and only a few plums to the others.  I am sorry to say that voiceless Carl ate all his grapes himself; but not a selfish or discontented look could I see on the faces of the others,—­they all smiled and beamed up at me like suns.

It is Anton who creates and sustains this rare atmosphere.  The wife is only a common and stupid woman; he is educating her, as he is the children.  She is very thin and worn and hungry-looking, but always smiles.  Being Anton’s wife, she could not do otherwise.

Sometimes I see people passing the house, who give a careless glance of contemptuous pity at Anton’s window of mallows and nasturtiums.  Then I remember that an apostle wrote:—­

“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.

“Therefore, if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.”

And I long to call after them, as they go groping their way down the beautiful street,—­

“Oh, ye barbarians, blind and deaf!  How dare you think you can pity Anton?  His soul would melt in compassion for you, if he were able to comprehend that lives could be so poor as yours.  He is the rich man, and you are poor.  Eating only the husks on which you feed, he would starve to death.”

English Lodging-Houses.

Somebody who has written stories (is it Dickens?) has given us very wrong ideas of the English lodging-house.  What good American does not go into London with the distinct impression that, whatever else he does or does not do, he will upon no account live in lodgings?  That he will even be content with the comfortless coffee-room of a second-rate hotel, and fraternize with commercial travellers from all quarters of the globe, rather than come into relations with that mixture of vulgarity and dishonesty, the lodging-house keeper?