woman's mind. How to
order a household, how to administer that little kingdom over which a
woman rules, and, above all, how to make family life stable, pure, and
conservative of the highest happiness, these were the questions which
she asked herself constantly, and which she tried to solve, not only
incidentally in her fiction, but directly in her essays, and in that
field of one tenth fiction and nine tenths didacticism, which
constitutes most of the present volume.

_A Scholar's Adventures in the Country_ and _Trials of a Housekeeper_
appeared in the miscellany to which she gave the name of _The
Mayflower_, and reflect humorously the Cincinnati experiences which
again are playfully recounted in letters published in her son's
_Life_. The former, contributed in 1850 to _The National Era_, was
drawn pretty closely from the experiments of Professor Stowe. It is
noticeable that in this paper and in _Our Second Girl_, which was
contributed to _The Atlantic Monthly_ for January, 1868, the author
poses as the masculine member of the household, as if this assumption
gave her some advantage in the point of view. At any rate, she adopted
the same role when she came more deliberately to survey a wide field
in a series of articles.

_The House_ and _Home Papers_ were contributed first to _The Atlantic
Monthly_, and afterward published in book form as the production of
one Christopher Crowfield, though there was not the slightest attempt
otherwise at disguising the authorship. The immediate occasion of the
papers was no doubt the removal of the Stowes from Andover and their
establishment in Hartford, an event which took place shortly before
the papers began to appear in _The Atlantic_. The years which followed
during the first Hartford residence saw also a marriage in the family
and new problems of daily life constantly presenting themselves, so
that a similar series appeared in the same magazine, purporting to be
from the same householder, entitled _The Chimney Corner_. This series,
indeed, entered rather more seriously into questions of social
morality, and deepened in feeling as it proceeded. The eleventh
section is a warm appreciation of the woman who figured so largely in
Mrs. Stowe's early life, and the last two papers rose, as the reader
will see, to the height of national memories. Mrs. Fields has
preserved for us, in her _Days with Mrs. Stowe_, a striking record of
the mingling of the great and the near in this writer's