ler may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep,
without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach
in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and
nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the
house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should
use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret;
where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so
convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your
respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes
your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief
ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the
mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the
trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn
whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A
house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you
cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some
of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the
freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven
eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself
at home there--in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not
admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself
somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the
greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he
had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's
premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware
that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a
king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if
I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all
that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all
its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at
such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were;
in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The
dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly. As if only the
savage dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to borr