The hearthstone; or, Life at home

The garden and the garden gate are often prominent objects in the picture of home memories, not for the Mauds who have met their lovers there and phghted their juvenile affections to each other, but because some of the sweetest home memories are associated with flowers and fields and shady trees and green velvet lawns. The first paradise of mankind was a garden, and the " sweet garden toil " the earliest business and pleasure of our first parents in primeval Eden. From that day to this, the flowers of the home garden make perfume and beauty for us. Home memories bring back the withered roses and violets, lilacs and lilies. Perhaps, when a child, we had a flowerbed of our own, and a happy rivalry to keep it in better order than our brothers and sisters did theirs may have been one of our earliest and highest ambitions. Was there a horse that bent his head to our caresses and looked with faithful, solemn eyes at us as we spoke to it by. name? was there a dog and did we hope, like the poor Indian, that when " Transplanted to that equal sky Our faithful dog would bear us company ? " They have their place in the retrospective picture. They are not forgotten. Carlo's bark and Dobbin's trot echo down the road of our remembrance. And if we " had a grandmother who had a donkey," that donkey will assert its place in our collection, remembered, perhaps, because it threw us gently off its back or philosophically ate turnips from our hand. But in the winter days and evenings when the snow was falling, about which such strange accounts were given us in the nursery, when out-door amusements were impossible to our little frames, and neither dog nor horse, donkey nor goat could share our pastimes, what object rises to our memories as most sacred to early musings and imaginings ? Surely, it is the open fire, in whose red coals or dying embers we beheld chariots and horsemen, and saw in mimic and flickering splendor domes, terraces and spires, faces with eyes of fiery brilliancy, hhands, arms, trees, houses, crowns of glory and of burning gold. Those who visit our country from more temperate chmes, where winter's reign is not so long and stern, wonder that we have stoves, that are not ornaments but iron lumber in our houses, instead of the cheery open fires of European households. They forget, or have not learned, that our North American winter has compelled this change ; but as a matter of aesthetic appearance and association the stove is undoubtedly an abomination, destructive of poetic reverie and suggestive only of the bare metallic hardness of human life, not of the fringe of glory and beauty that should surround it. The dear old grate with its red, glowing coals seemed to record "the story of our lives from day to day ; " the gigantic stove records nothing but the ironmonger's prosaic trade. No poet ever yet drew inspiration from a stove. It may be a fine self-feeder, but it is no soulfeeder. It is of the earth earthy, and its range of suggestiveness has no horizon except pots and pans. But in the fires of the old nursery of childhood's home, what solemn processions, what grand illuminations have we seen ! In the twilight hour, before the candles or the lamps were lit, the child-philosopher and poet has read in the clear trembling of the red live coals many an allegory and parable, many a history and prop