t understand such
things. What _can_ men know of housekeeping, and how things ought to
look? Papa never goes into company; he don't know and don't care how the
world is doing, and don't see that nobody now is living as we do."

"Aha, my little mistresses, are you there?" I thought; and I mentally
resolved on opposing a great force of what our politicians call
_backbone_ to this pretty domestic conspiracy.

"When you get my writing-table out of this corner, my pretty dears, I'd
thank you to let me know it."

Thus spake I in my blindness, fool that I was. Jupiter might as soon
keep awake, when Juno came in best bib and tucker, and with the _cestus_
of Venus, to get him to sleep. Poor Slender might as well hope to get
the better of pretty Mistress Anne Page, as one of us clumsy-footed men
might endeavor to escape from the tangled labyrinth of female wiles.

In short, in less than a year it was all done, without any quarrel, any
noise, any violence,--done, I scarce knew when or how, but with the
utmost deference to my wishes, the most amiable hopes that I would not
put myself out, the most sincere protestations, that, if I liked it
better as it was, my goddesses would give up and acquiesce. In fact, I
seemed to do it of myself, constrained thereto by what the Emperor
Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,--that old,
well-known logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he
who has said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year, we had a parlor
with two lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six
chairs and a looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in
the floor which kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that
kept out all the light that was not already excluded by the green
shades.

It was as proper and orderly a parlor as those of our most fashionable
neighbors; and when our friends called, we took them stumbling into its
darkened solitude, and opened a faint crack in one of the window-shades,
and came down in our best clothes, and talked with them there. Our old
friends rebelled at this, and asked what they had done to be treated so,
and complained so bitterly that gradually we let them into the secret
that there was a great south-room which I had taken for my study, where
we all sat, where the old carpet was down, where the sun shone in at the
great window, where my wife's plants flourished and the canary-bird
sang, and my wife had her sofa in the corne