ing to
night, there are so many things in the house that something dreadful is
happening to all the while, and the servants we get are so clumsy. Why,
when I sit with Sophie and Aunt Zeruah, it's nothing but a constant
string of complaints about the girls in the kitchen. We keep changing
our servants all the time, and they break and destroy so that now we are
turned out of the use of all our things. We not only eat in the
basement, but all our pretty table-things are put away, and we have all
the cracked plates and cracked tumblers and cracked teacups and old
buck-handled knives that can be raised out of chaos. I could use these
things and be merry, if I didn't know we had better ones; and I can't
help wondering whether there isn't some way that our table could be set
to look like a gentleman's table; but Aunt Zeruah says that 'it would
cost thousands, and what difference does it make as long as nobody sees
it but us?' You see, there's no medium in her mind between china and
crystal and cracked earthen-ware. Well, I'm wondering how all these laws
of the Medes and Persians are going to work when the children come
along. I'm in hopes the children will soften off the old folks, and make
the, house more habitable."

Well, children did come, a good many of them, in time. There was Tom, a
broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked, active, hilarious son of mischief,
born in the very image of his father; and there was Charlie, and Jim,
and Louisa, and Sophie the second, and Frank,--and a better, brighter,
more joy-giving household, as far as temperament and nature were
concerned, never existed.

But their whole childhood was a long battle, children _versus_
furniture, and furniture always carried the day. The first step of the
housekeeping powers was to choose the least agreeable and least
available room in the house for the children's nursery, and to fit it up
with all the old, cracked, rickety furniture a neighboring auction-shop
could afford, and then to keep them in it. Now everybody knows that to
bring up children to be upright, true, generous, and religious, needs so
much discipline, so much restraint and correction, and so many rules and
regulations, that it is all that the parents can carry out, and all the
children can bear. There is only a certain amount of the vital force for
parents or children to use in this business of education, and one must
choose what It shall be used for. The Aunt-Zeruah faction chose to use
it for k