season, which my wife turned over as she took her after-dinner lounge on the sofa.  And in the bow-window were canaries always singing, and a great stand of plants always fresh and blooming, and ivy which grew and clambered and twined about the pictures.  Best of all, there was in our parlor that household altar, the blazing wood-fire, whose wholesome, hearty crackle is the truest household inspiration.  I quite agree with one celebrated American author who holds that an open fireplace is an altar of patriotism.  Would our Revolutionary fathers have gone barefooted and bleeding over snows to defend air-tight stoves and cooking-ranges?  I trow not.  It was the memory of the great open kitchen-fire, with its back-log and fore-stick of cord-wood, its roaring, hilarious voice of invitation, its dancing tongues of flame, that called to them through the snows of that dreadful winter to keep up their courage, that made their hearts warm and bright with a thousand reflected memories.  Our neighbors said that it was delightful to sit by our fire,—­but then, for their part, they could not afford it, wood was so ruinously dear, and all that.  Most of these people could not, for the simple reason that they felt compelled, in order to maintain the family-dignity, to keep up a parlor with great pomp and circumstance of upholstery, where they sat only on dress-occasions, and of course the wood-fire was out of the question.

When children began to make their appearance in our establishment, my wife, like a well-conducted housekeeper, had the best of nursery-arrangements,—­a room all warmed, lighted, and ventilated, and abounding in every proper resource of amusement to the rising race; but it was astonishing to see how, notwithstanding this, the centripetal attraction drew every pair of little pattering feet to our parlor.

“My dear, why don’t you take your blocks up-stairs?”

“I want to be where oo are,” said with a piteous under-lip, was generally a most convincing answer.

Then the small people could not be disabused of the idea that certain chief treasures of their own would be safer under papa’s writing-table or mamma’s sofa than in the safest closet of their own domains.  My writing-table was dockyard for Arthur’s new ship, and stable for little Tom’s pepper-and-salt-colored pony, and carriage-house for Charley’s new wagon, while whole armies of paper dolls kept house in the recess behind mamma’s sofa.

And then, in due time, came the tribe of pets who followed the little ones and rejoiced in the blaze of the firelight.  The boys had a splendid Newfoundland, which, knowing our weakness, we warned them with awful gravity was never to be a parlor-dog; but, somehow, what with little beggings and pleadings on the part of Arthur and Tom, and the piteous melancholy with which Rover would look through the window-panes, when shut out from the blazing warmth into the dark, cold veranda, it at last came to pass that Rover gained