laundress,
nursery-maid, housemaid, and lady's maid. Such is the array that in
the Old Country would be deemed necessary to take care of an
establishment got up like hers. Everything in it is too fine,--not too
fine to be pretty, not in bad taste in itself, but too fine for the
situation, too fine for comfort or liberty.

What ensues in a house so furnished? Too often, ceaseless fretting of
the nerves, in the wife's despairing, conscientious efforts to keep
things as they should be. There is no freedom in a house where things
are too expensive and choice to be freely handled and easily replaced.
Life becomes a series of petty embarrassments and restrictions,
something is always going wrong, and the man finds his fireside
oppressive,--the various articles of his parlor and table seem like so
many temper-traps and spring-guns, menacing explosion and disaster.

There may be, indeed, the most perfect home-feeling, the utmost
cosiness and restfulness, in apartments crusted with gilding, carpeted
with velvet, and upholstered with satin. I have seen such, where the
home-like look and air of free use was as genuine as in a Western log
cabin; but this was in a range of princely income that made all these
things as easy to be obtained or replaced as the most ordinary of our
domestic furniture. But so long as articles must be shrouded from use,
or used with fear and trembling, because their cost is above the
general level of our means, we had better be without them, even
though the most lucky of accidents may put their possession in our
power.

But it is not merely by the effort to maintain too much elegance
that the sense of home liberty is banished from a house. It is
sometimes expelled in another way, with all painstaking and
conscientious strictness, by the worthiest and best of human beings,
the blessed followers of Saint Martha. Have we not known them, the
deaf, worthy creatures, up before daylight, causing most scrupulous
lustrations of every pane of glass and inch of paint in our
parlors, in consequence whereof every shutter and blind must be
kept closed for days to come, lest the flies should speck the freshly
washed windows and wainscoting? Dear shade of Aunt Mehitabel,
forgive our boldness! Have we not been driven for days, in our
youth, to read our newspaper in the front veranda, in the kitchen,
out in the barn,--anywhere, in fact, where sunshine could be
found,--because there was not a room in the house that was n