The hearthstone; or, Life at home

" Those lights of home " — The Mecca of the heart — A German Legend — An inspiring task — The weal or woe of the house — The true basis of home-life — A one needful presence — For the children's sake — A humiliating admission — The pleasantest place in the house — An eyesore anywhere — Dining-room walls — A bright background — What the best authorities favor — Dining-room furnishings — The place for a mirror — Small articles and pictures — Silver wire versus woollen cord — Desirable ornaments — BufTct and silver — A lack that is felt — Knick-knacks — Chairs — Why children are ill-mannered — The advantages of a sitting-room— (ix) X CONTENTS. One lady's habit — Drawing-rooms and parlors — How to furnish a sitting-room — The "little things" — Elevation of domestic service — Overtaxed women — A grave error — What parlor carpets do — Strong charges — " Too good to be used" — Master of the house — Shaker independence — Not slaves to inanimate things — At what they marvel — Their religious principle — The origin of carpets — For what first used — " If" — Woman should be consulted — Good floors — Old time flowerbed designs — Cheap carpets — How corners are kept clean — The enemy of weak lungs — How to sweep a carpet — A radical doctrine — The adornment of windows— Objections to certain kinds of draperies — The secret of success with curtains— Flowers in the window — An objection to window gardens — Ferneries — A window conservatory — How made — A necessity of all windows — A beautiful transparency — True method of cleaning windows — Wire-screens — The mistake of house furnishers — Costly things not always the most desirable — The error of choosing hastily — What to buy — Mantle decorations — The folly of overcrowding— In regard to books — The borrowing visitor — A folding screen — Old furniture re-covered — Preferred materials — A mantle-piece border — Fire-place screen — Some uses of silesia — Time wasted — Work-basket curiosities — A discouraging sight — An evil genius in the home — Temperance in sewing — The pleasure of work — What is weaved into its warp and woof — The veneering style in sewing — A much abused trade — Art needle-work 36 Reflections of the father — His misgivings — A familiar domestic scene — The mother's meditations — A miniature of all biography — Entertaining an angel unawares — "Why" — Precocious and gifted children — Where parents live again — A curious incident — Multitudinous reflections — Thomas Starr King's death-bed — A spiritualistic theory — " The patterns of things in heaven " — Parents who transmitted their life-work — Darwin and Herbert Spencer as intellectual heirs — Parental responsibility — "A mere child" — A study of a baby — Samuel Johnson's advice — The parents, hand — Hartley Coleridge's childhood — His brother's account of it — Henry Crabb Robinson's diary — Precocity of Coleridge — Odes to him by his father, and by Wordsworth — His character and fate — A strange combination of qualities — The slave of the opium habit — The inheritor of his father's sins — An opium-eating father — A dram-drinking son — The fatal transmission of appetites — A bright career blighted — Expelled from England's oldest university — A hopeless drunkard — A lesson to fathers — The unwritten page of a child's life — A mistaken idea — Pharaoh's daughter — The child not to vegetate, but to live — An old proveib should be verified — Home influences — The government of temper — The baby at the home-school — Itself a teacher — Its chief lessons — The fatber's second birth —