with hideous coats and splashy trimmings.  But alas for sentiment when the money bags are against it!  Profit before poetry any day in this nineteenth century, my dear, and so when an interested capitalist came up from town and gave it as his opinion that the old house would be worth a third more if put on the market in a terra cotta coat with sage-green trimmings the day was lost for me.  I had to strike my colors like many another idealist in this practical world.  In the first place, there has been for the last fifteen years or so, a vine growing all over the old home, catching its lithe tendrils into the roof and making cathedral lights in all the windows.  It has been the home of generations of robins.  It has hung full of purple, bell-shaped blossoms on coral stems that have attracted a thousand humming birds and honey bees by their fragrance.  It has changed into a veritable cloth of gold in early September, and in late October has flamed into scarlet against the gray roof, like a blaze that quivers athwart a stormy sky.  It has been the joy of my life and the inspiration of my dreams, but it had to come down before the paint-pot!  So one night when I reached home, tired to death with a hand-to-hand encounter with the demon who gives poor mortals their bread and butter for an equivalent of flesh and blood and spirit, I noticed that the little folks greeted me with an air of subdued decorum as though fresh from a funeral.  There were no caperings, no flauntings, no cavortings.  Each young minx had on her Sunday go-to-meeting air, and the boy stood with his hat on one side of his head, as though for a sixpence he would fight all creation.  Wondering at the change, I happened to look toward the house, and there it stood in the light of the fading day, like a poor old woman without a veil to hide her wrinkles!  Every window looked ashamed of itself, and on the ground lay the dear old vine, prone as a lost reputation.

“I never see such an ill-fired crank in all the days of my life!” remarked the painter to the new girl, after I had held a brief but spirited interview with him over the garden fence; “blanked if she didn’t cry because her vine was down!”

XLVII.

The old sitting-room stove.

What is there within the home, during the winter season at least, that seems so thoroughly to constitute the soul of home as the family-room stove?  It can never be replaced by that ugly hole in the floor which floods our rooms with furnace heat, with no glow of cheerful firelight, no flicker of flame or changeful play of shadow out of which to weave fantastic dreams and fancies.  I once watched the dying out of one of these fires in a great base burner, around which for years a large and loving family had gathered.  The furniture of the home had all been sold, and the family was about to scatter.  The trunks were packed and gone, the last article removed from the