years.”  Thoreau’s furniture at Walden consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs, a kettle, a frying-pan, a wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a japanned lamp.  There were no ornaments.  He writes, “I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, and I threw them out of the window in disgust.”

“Our cottage is quite large enough for us, though very small,” wrote Miss Wordsworth, “and we have made it neat and comfortable within doors; and it looks very nice on the outside, for though the roses and honeysuckle which we have planted against it are only of this year’s growth, yet it is covered all over with green leaves and scarlet flowers, for we have trained scarlet beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly beautiful, but very useful, as their produce is immense.  We have made a lodging room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor, therefore we have covered it all over with matting.  We sit in a room above stairs, and we have one lodging room with two single beds, a sort of lumber room, and a small, low, unceiled room, which I have papered with newspapers, and in which we have put a small bed.  Our servant is an old woman of 60 years of age, whom we took partly out of charity.”  Here Miss Wordsworth and her brother, the great poet, lived on the simplest fare and drank cold water, and hence issued those noble poems which more than any others teach us the higher life.

   “Blush, grandeur, blush; proud courts, withdraw your blaze;
   Ye little stars, hide your diminished rays.”

“I turned schoolmaster,” says Sydney Smith, “to educate my son, as I could not afford to send him to school.  Mrs. Sydney turned schoolmistress to educate my girls as I could not afford a governess.  I turned farmer as I could not let my land.  A man servant was too expensive, so I caught up a little garden girl, made like a milestone, christened her Bunch, put a napkin in her hand, and made her my butler.  The girls taught her to read, Mrs. Sydney to wait, and I undertook her morals.  Bunch became the best butler in the country.  I had little furniture, so I bought a cartload of deals; took a carpenter (who came to me for parish relief) called Jack Robinson, with a face like a full moon, into my service, established him in a barn, and said, ’Jack, furnish my house.’  You see the result.”

Then what shall I say of the luxury of endless daily papers, leading articles, short paragraphs, reviews, illustrated papers,—­are not these luxuries?  Are they not inventions for making thought easy, or rather for the purpose of relieving us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves.  May I also, without raising a religious controversy, observe that in religious worship we are prone to relieve ourselves from the