My wife and I were somewhat advanced housekeepers, and our dwelling was first furnished by her father, in the old-fashioned jog-trot days, when furniture was made with a view to its lasting from generation to generation.  Everything was strong and comfortable,—­heavy mahogany, guiltless of the modern device of veneering, and hewed out with a square solidity which had not an idea of change.  It was, so to speak, a sort of granite foundation of the household structure.  Then, we commenced housekeeping with the full idea that our house was a thing to be lived in, and that furniture was made to be used.  That most sensible of women, Mrs. Crowfield, agreed fully with me that in our house there was to be nothing too good for ourselves,—­no rooms shut up in holiday attire to be enjoyed by strangers for three or four days in the year, while we lived in holes and corners,—­no best parlor from which we were to be excluded,—­no best china which we were not to use,—­no silver plate to be kept in the safe in the bank, and brought home only in case of a grand festival, while our daily meals were served with dingy Britannia.  “Strike a broad, plain average,” I said to my wife; “have everything abundant, serviceable; and give all our friends exactly what we have ourselves, no better and no worse";—­and my wife smiled approval on my sentiment.

Smile! she did more than smile.  My wife resembles one of those convex mirrors I have sometimes seen.  Every idea I threw out, plain and simple, she reflected back upon me in a thousand little glitters and twinkles of her own; she made my crude conceptions come back to me in such perfectly dazzling performances that I hardly recognized them.  My mind warms up, when I think what a home that woman made of our house from the very first day she moved into it.  The great, large, airy parlor, with its ample bow-window, when she had arranged it, seemed a perfect trap to catch sunbeams.  There was none of that discouraging trimness and newness that often repel a man’s bachelor-friends after the first call, and make them feel,—­“Oh, well, one cannot go in at Crowfield’s now, unless one is dressed; one might put them out.”  The first thing our parlor said to any one was, that we were not people to be put out, that we were wide-spread, easy-going, and jolly folk.  Even if Tom Brown brought in Ponto and his shooting-bag, there was nothing in that parlor to strike terror into man and dog; for it was written on the face of things, that everybody there was to do just as he or she pleased.  There were my books and my writing-table spread out with all its miscellaneous confusion of papers on one side of the fireplace, and there were my wife’s great, ample sofa and work-table on the other; there I wrote my articles for the “North American,” and there she turned and ripped and altered her dresses, and there lay crochet and knitting and embroidery side by side with a weekly basket of family-mending, and in neighborly contiguity with the last book of the