Likening the lesser to the greater, allow me to say that I cannot imagine any topic worthy the attention of God-fearing, humanity-loving men and women that would not be connected in some degree, near or remote, with “Home, and How to Make Home Happy.”

The general principles underlying home-making of the right kind are as well-known as the fact that what is named gravitation draws falling bodies to the earth.  These principles may be set down roughly as Order, Kindness and Mutual Forbearance.  Upon one or another of these pegs hangs everything which enters into the comfort and pleasure of the household, taken collectively and individually.  They are the beams, the uprights and the roofing of the building.

The chats, more or less confidential and altogether unconventional, which I propose to hold with the readers of this modest volume have to do with certain sub-laws which are so often overlooked that—­to return to the figure of the building—­the wind finds its way through chinks; the floors creak and the general impression is that of bare homeliness.  House and Home go together upon tongue and upon pen as naturally as hook-and-eye, shovel-and-tongs, knife-and-fork,—­yet the coupling is rather a trick learned through habit than an act of reason.  The words are not synonyms of necessity or in fact.

Upon these, the first pages of my unconventional book, I avow my knowledge of what, so far from humiliating, stimulates me—­to wit, that nine-tenths of those who will look beyond the title-page will be women.  This is well, and as I would have it to be, for without feminine agency no house, however well appointed, can be anything higher than an official residence.

Man’s first possession in a world then unmarred by sin was a dwelling-place—­but Eden was not a home until the woman joined him there.  Throughout the ages and all over the world, as mother, wife, sister, daughter (often, let me observe in passing, as old-maid aunt) she has stood with him as the representative of the rest, sympathy and love to be found nowhere except under his own roof-tree, and beside his own fireside.  It is not the house that makes the home, any more than it is the jeweled case that makes the watch, or the body that makes the human being.  It is the Presence, the nameless influence which is the earliest acknowledged by the child, and the latest to be forgotten by man or woman.  The establishment of this power is essentially woman’s prerogative.

In this one respect—­I dare not say in any other—­we outrank our brothers.  They can build palaces and the furniture that fits them up in regal state; they can, even better than we, prepare for the royal tables food convenient for them, and fashion the attire of the revelers, and make the music and sing the songs and write the books and paint the pictures of the world.  They may make and execute our laws and sail our seas, and fight our battles, and—­after dutiful consultation with us—­cast