in a little dingy den, with a window looking out
on a back-alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the
dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is such a care off
Sophy's mind that I ought to be willing to eat down-cellar to the end of
the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because
Sophie's folks all agree, that, if there is anything in creation that is
ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be allowed his way anywhere, it's 'a
man'. Why, you'd think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like
bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend, if we are not
kept down-cellar and chained; and she worries Sophie, and Sophie's
mother comes in and worries, and if I try to get anything done
differently, Sophie cries, and says she don't know what to do, and so I
give it up. Now, if I want to ask a few of our set in sociably to
dinner, I can't have them where we eat down-cellar,--oh, that would
never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie's mother and the whole family would
think the family-honor was forever ruined and undone. We mustn't ask
them, unless we open the dining-room, and have out all the best china,
and get the silver home from the bank; and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah
doesn't sleep for a week beforehand, getting ready for it, and for a
week after, getting things put away; and then she tells me, that, in
Sophie's delicate state, it really is abominable for me to increase her
cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with me at Delmonico's, and then
Sophie cries, and Sophie's mother says it doesn't look respectable for a
family-man to be dining at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a
home somewhere!"

My wife soothed the chafed spirit, and spake comfortably unto him, and
told him that he knew there was the old lounging-chair always ready for
him at our fireside. "And you know," she said, "our things are all so
plain that we are never tempted to mount any guard over them; our
carpets are nothing, and therefore we let the sun fade them, and live on
the sunshine and the flowers."

"That's it," said Bill, bitterly, "Carpets fading!--that's Aunt Zeruah's
monomania. These women think that the great object of houses is to keep
out sunshine. What a fool I was, when I gloated over the prospect of our
sunny south windows! Why, man, there are three distinct sets of
fortifications against the sunshine in those windows: first, outside
blinds; then, solid, folding, inside shutters; and