Let us touch one or two points very briefly.  I have said that men can furnish houses more artistically than we, and that as professional cooks they surpass us.  It should follow naturally that men, to whose hearts the stomach is the shortest thoroughfare, would, in a body, resort to hotels for daily food.  There is but one satisfactory explanation of the unphilosophical fact that the substantial citizen who, during a domestic interregnum, makes the experiment of three meals a day for one month at the best restaurant in New York City (and there are no better anywhere) returns with gladness and singleness of heart to his own extension-table—­and that were I to put the question “Contract Cookery or Home Cookery?” to the few Johns who deign to peruse these lines, the acclaim would be—­“Better, as everyday fare, is a broiled beefsteak and a mealy potato at home, than a palatial hotel and ten courses.”

There is individuality in the steak broiled for John’s very self, and sentiment in the pains taken to keep the starch in his potato, and solid satisfaction in putting one’s knees under his own mahogany.  The least romantic of gourmands objects to stirring his appetite into a common vat with five hundred others.  But there is something back of all this that makes home-fare delicious, when the house mother smiles across the dish she has sweetened with love and spiced with good-will, and thus transformed it into a message from her heart to the hearts of the dear ones to whom she ministers.

John—­being of the masculine gender according to a decree of Nature, and, therefore, irresponsible for the slow pace at which his wits move—­may not be able at once to analyze the odd heartache he feels in surveying the apartments fitted up by the upholsterer—­or to tell you why they become no longer a tri-syllabled word, but “our rooms,” within a day after wife and daughters have taken possession of them.  The honest fellow cannot see but that the furniture is the same, and each article standing in the same place—­but the new atmosphere “which is the old,” greets him upon the threshold, and steals into his heart before he has fairly entered.  Anybody could have shaken the stiffness out of that portiere, and put a low, shaded lamp under the picture he likes best, and broken up the formal symmetry of the bric-a-brac that reminded him, although he did not dare confess it, of a china shop, and set a slender vaselet with one big ragged golden globe of a chrysanthemum in it here, and over there a bowl of long-stemmed roses—­(his favorite Bon Silenes, too).  But what hireling, O blind and dear John! would have left a bit of fancy work with the needle sticking in it, and scissors lying upon it, on the table in library or smoking room, and put the song you always ask for at twilight upon the open piano, and, just where you would choose to cast yourself down to listen, your especial Sleepy Hollow of chair or lounge with the slumber robe worked last Christmas by loving fingers thrown invitingly across it?