“It is said that a king of France once remarked,—­’My son, you must seem to love your people.’

“‘Father, how shall I seem to love them?’

“‘My son, you must love them.’

“So to make rooms seem home-like you must be at home in them.  Human light and warmth are so wanting in some rooms, it is so evident that they are never used, that you can never be at ease there.  In vain the house-maid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair towards chair; in vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the centre-table.

“Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have really been moved here and there in the animation of social contact, have a sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people really live and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a live woman from a wax image.

“Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this one grace, that they seem to let you into the home-life and home-current.  You seem to understand in a moment that you are taken into the family, and are moving in its inner circles, and not revolving at a distance in some outer court of the gentiles.

“How many people do we call on from year to year and know no more of their feelings, habits, tastes, family ideas and ways, than if they lived in Kamtschatka!  And why?  Because the room which they call a front-parlor is made expressly so that you never shall know.  They sit in a back-room,—­work, talk, read, perhaps.  After the servant has let you in and opened a crack of the shutters, and while you sit waiting for them to change their dress and come in, you speculate as to what they may be doing.  From some distant region, the laugh of a child, the song of a canary-bird, reaches you, and then a door claps hastily to.  Do they love plants?  Do they write letters, sew, embroider, crochet?  Do they ever romp and frolic?  What books do they read?  Do they sketch or paint?  Of all these possibilities the mute and muffled room says nothing.  A sofa and six chairs, two ottomans fresh from the upholsterer’s, a Brussels carpet, a centre-table with four gilt Books of Beauty on it, a mantel-clock from Paris, and two bronze vases,—­all these tell you only in frigid tones, ’This is the best room,’—­only that, and nothing more,—­and soon she trips in in her best clothes, and apologizes for keeping you waiting, asks how your mother is, and you remark that it is a pleasant day,—­and thus the acquaintance progresses from year to year.  One hour in the little back-room, where the plants and canary-bird and children are, might have made you fast friends for life; but as it is, you care no more for them than for the gilt clock on the mantel.

“And now, girls,” said I, pulling a paper out of my pocket, “you must know that your father is getting to be famous by means of these ’House and Home Papers.’  Here is a letter I have just received:—­