from china by a thousand falls." She spoke even with tears in her eyes.
Verily, these women are harps of a thousand strings!

But to return to my subject.

"Finally and lastly," I said, "in my analysis and explication of the
agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the crowning grace,--their
_homeliness_. By homeliness I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to
be used, but the air that is given to a room by being _really_ at home
in it. Not the most skilful arrangement can impart this charm.

"It is said that a king of France once remarked,--'My son, you must seem
to love your people.'

"'Father, how shall I _seem_ to love them?'

"'My son, you _must_ love them.'

"So to make rooms _seem_ home-like you must be at home in them. Human
light and warmth are so wanting in some rooms, it is so evident that
they are never used, that you can never be at ease there. In vain the
house-maid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair towards chair; in
vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the
centre-table.

"Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have really
been moved here and there in the animation of social contact, have a
sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people really live
and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a live woman from
a wax image.

"Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this one
grace, that they seem to let you into the home-life and home-current.
You seem to understand in a moment that you are taken into the family,
and are moving in its inner circles, and not revolving at a distance in
some outer court of the gentiles.

"How many people do we call on from year to year and know no more of
their feelings, habits, tastes, family ideas and ways, than if they
lived in Kamtschatka! And why? Because the room which they call a
front-parlor is made expressly so that you never shall know. They sit in
a back-room,--work, talk, read, perhaps. After the servant has let you
in and opened a crack of the shutters, and while you sit waiting for
them to change their dress and come in, you speculate as to what they
may be doing. From some distant region, the laugh of a child, the song
of a canary-bird, reaches you, and then a door claps hastily to. Do they
love plants? Do they write letters, sew, embroider, crochet? Do they
ever romp and frolic? What books do they read? Do they sketch or paint?
Of all these possibilities