king
every untidy particle of ashes from the hearth, shows in every movement
of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the knowing, observing
glance of her eye, and in all her energetic movements, that her small
person is endued and made up of the very expressed essence of
housewifeliness,--she is the very attar, not of roses, but of
housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness are a nature to her;
she is as dainty and delicate in her person as a white cat, as
everlastingly busy as a bee; and all the most needful faculties of time,
weight, measure, and proportion out to be fully developed in her skull,
if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides all this, she has a sort of
hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my fanciful
conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a little sharp
grating, if they are not well put. In fact, this kind of woman needs
carefully to be idealized in the process of education, or she will
stiffen and dry, as she grows old, into a veritable household Pharisee,
a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in artistic values
and artistic weights and measures, to study all the arts and sciences of
the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most useful, most needful,
these little women: they have the centripetal force which keeps all the
domestic planets from gyrating and frisking in unseemly orbits,--and
properly trained, they fill a house with the beauty of order, the
harmony and consistency of proportion, the melody of things moving in
time and tune, without violating the graceful appearance of ease which
Art requires.

So I had an eye to Jennie's education in my article which I unfolded and
read, and which was entitled,

HOME-KEEPING _vs._ HOUSE-KEEPING.

There are many women who know how to keep a house, but there are but few
that know how to keep a _home_. To keep a house may seem a complicated
affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it lies in the region of
the material, in the region of weight, measure, color, and the positive
forces of life. To keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all
these, but it takes in the intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the
immortal.

Here the hickory-stick broke in two, and the two brands fell
controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and
coals, and calling for Jennie and the hearth-brush. Your wood-fire had
this foible, that it needs something to be done to it ev