We have a custom at our house which we call _raking up the fire_. That
is to say, the last half hour before bedtime, we draw in, shoulder to
shoulder, around the last brands and embers of our hearth, which we
prick up and brighten, and dispose for a few farewell flickers and
glimmers. This is a grand time for discussion. Then we talk over
parties, if the young people have been out of an evening,--a book, if
we have been reading one; we discuss and analyze characters,--give our
views on all subjects, aesthetic, theological, and scientific, in a way
most wonderful to hear; and, in fact, we sometimes get so engaged in
our discussions that every spark of the fire burns out, and we begin
to feel ourselves shivering around the shoulders, before we can
remember that it is bedtime.
So, after the reading of my last article, we had a "raking-up
talk,"--to wit, Jenny, Marianne, and I, with Bob Stephens: my wife,
still busy at her work-basket, sat at the table a little behind us.
Jenny, of course, opened the ball in her usual incisive manner.
"But now, papa, after all you say in your piece there, I cannot help
feeling that, if I had the taste and the money too, it would be better
than the taste alone with no money. I like the nice arrangements and
the books and the drawings, but I think all these would appear better
still with really elegant furniture."
"Who doubts that?" said I. "Give me a large tub of gold coin to dip
into, and the furnishing and beautifying 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 armchair was worn out, and that some
veneering had fallen off the centre-table.
"I have a friend, a schoolmistress, 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 Jenny, "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, and their things won't do
anything at all. There's Aunt Easygo has plant after plant brought
from the greenhouse, and hanging-baskets, and all sorts of things; but
her plants grow yellow and drop their leaves, and her hanging-baskets
get dusty and poverty-stricken, while mamma's go on flourishing as
heart could desire."
"I can tell you what your mother puts into her plants," said
I,--"just what she has put into her children, and all her other
home-things,--her _heart_. She loves them; she lives in them; she has
in herself a plant-life and a plant-sympathy. She feels for them as
if she herself were a plant; she anticipates their wants,--always
remembers them without an effort, and so the care flows to them
daily and hourly. She hardly knows when she does the things that
make them grow, but she gives them a minute a hundred times a day.
She moves this nearer the glass,--draws that back,--detects some thief
of a worm on one,--digs at the root of another, to see why it
droops,--washes these leaves and sprinkles those,--waters, and
refrains from watering, all with the habitual care of love. Your
mother herself doesn't know why her plants grow; it takes a
philosopher and a writer for the 'Atlantic' to tell her what the cause
is."