tifying of a house is a simple affair.
The same taste that could make beauty out of cents and dimes could make
it more abundantly out of dollars and eagles. But I have been speaking
for those who have not, and cannot get, riches, and who wish to have
agreeable houses; and I begin in the outset by saying that beauty is a
thing to be respected, reverenced, and devoutly cared for,--and then I
say that BEAUTY IS CHEAP, nay, to put it so that the shrewdest Yankee
will understand it, BEAUTY IS THE CHEAPEST THING YOU CAN HAVE, because
in many ways it is a substitute for expense. A few vases of flowers in a
room, a few blooming, well-kept plants, a few prints framed in fanciful
frames of cheap domestic fabric, a statuette, a bracket, an engraving, a
pencil-sketch, above all, a few choice books,--all these arranged by a
woman who has the gift in her finger-ends often produce such an illusion
on the mind's eye that one goes away without once having noticed that
the cushion of the arm-chair was worn out, and that some veneering had
fallen off the centre-table.

"I have a friend, a school-mistress, who lives in a poor little cottage
enough, which, let alone of the Graces, might seem mean and sordid, but
a few flower-seeds and a little weeding in the spring make it, all
summer, an object which everybody stops to look at. Her aesthetic soul
was at first greatly tried with the water-barrel which stood under the
eaves-spout,--a most necessary evil, since only thus could her scanty
supply of soft water for domestic purposes be secured. One of the
Graces, however, suggested to her a happy thought. She planted a row of
morning-glories round the bottom of her barrel, and drove a row of tacks
around the top, and strung her water-butt with twine, like a great
harpsichord. A few weeks covered the twine with blossoming plants, which
every morning were a mass of many-colored airy blooms, waving in
graceful sprays, and looking at themselves in the water. The
water-barrel, in fact, became a celebrated stroke of ornamental
gardening, which the neighbors came to look at."

"Well, but," said Jennie, "everybody hasn't mamma's faculty with
flowers. Flowers will grow for some people, and for some they won't.
Nobody can see what mamma does so very much, but her plants always look
fresh and thriving and healthy,--her things blossom just when she wants
them, and do anything else she wishes them to; and there are other
people that fume and fuss and try, a