“Of course, I couldn’t say that I wished the whole set and system of housekeeping women at the—­what-’s-his-name? because Sophie would have cried for a week, and been utterly forlorn and disconsolate.  I know it’s not the poor girl’s fault; I try sometimes to reason with her, but you can’t reason with the whole of your wife’s family, to the third and fourth generation backwards; but I’m sure it’s hurting her health,—­wearing her out.  Why, you know Sophie used to be the life of our set; and now she really seems eaten up with care from morning to night, there are so many things in the house that something dreadful is happening to all the while, and the servants we get are so clumsy.  Why, when I sit with Sophie and Aunt Zeruah, it’s nothing but a constant string of complaints about the girls in the kitchen.  We keep changing our servants all the time, and they break and destroy so that now we are turned out of the use of all our things.  We not only eat in the basement, but all our pretty table-things are put away, and we have all the cracked plates and cracked tumblers and cracked teacups and old buck-handled knives that can be raised out of chaos.  I could use these things and be merry, if I didn’t know we had better ones; and I can’t help wondering whether there isn’t some way that our table could be set to look like a gentleman’s table; but Aunt Zeruah says that ’it would cost thousands, and what difference does it make as long as nobody sees it but us?’ You see, there’s no medium in her mind between china and crystal and cracked earthen-ware.  Well, I’m wondering how all these laws of the Medes and Persians are going to work when the children come along.  I’m in hopes the children will soften off the old folks, and make the, house more habitable.”

Well, children did come, a good many of them, in time.  There was Tom, a broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked, active, hilarious son of mischief, born in the very image of his father; and there was Charlie, and Jim, and Louisa, and Sophie the second, and Frank,—­and a better, brighter, more joy-giving household, as far as temperament and nature were concerned, never existed.

But their whole childhood was a long battle, children versus furniture, and furniture always carried the day.  The first step of the housekeeping powers was to choose the least agreeable and least available room in the house for the children’s nursery, and to fit it up with all the old, cracked, rickety furniture a neighboring auction-shop could afford, and then to keep them in it.  Now everybody knows that to bring up children to be upright, true, generous, and religious, needs so much discipline, so much restraint and correction, and so many rules and regulations, that it is all that the parents can carry out, and all the children can bear.  There is only a certain amount of the vital force for parents or children to use in this business of education, and one must choose what It shall be used for.  The Aunt-Zeruah faction chose to use it for keeping the house and furniture, and the children’s education proceeded accordingly.  The rules of right and wrong of which they heard most frequently were all of this sort:  Naughty children were those who went up the front-stairs, or sat on the best sofa, or fingered any of the books in the library, or got out one of the best teacups, or drank out of the cut-glass goblets.