besides, it is artistic.  I should like to know if an artist could ever represent on canvas a happy family gathered round a hole in the floor called a register.  Given a fireplace, and a tolerable artist could almost create a pleasant family round it.  But what could he conjure out of a register?  If there was any virtue among our ancestors,—­and they labored under a great many disadvantages, and had few of the aids which we have to excellence of life,—­I am convinced they drew it mostly from the fireside.  If it was difficult to read the eleven commandments by the light of a pine-knot, it was not difficult to get the sweet spirit of them from the countenance of the serene mother knitting in the chimney-corner.

III

When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial in its effulgence.  I have never been upon a throne,—­except in moments of a traveler’s curiosity, about as long as a South American dictator remains on one,—­but I have no idea that it compares, for pleasantness, with a seat before a wood-fire.  A whole leisure day before you, a good novel in hand, and the backlog only just beginning to kindle, with uncounted hours of comfort in it, has life anything more delicious?  For “novel” you can substitute “Calvin’s Institutes,” if you wish to be virtuous as well as happy.  Even Calvin would melt before a wood-fire.  A great snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room, loading the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great chestnut-tops, piled up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths, the shrubbery, the hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits, deepening your sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness by making it a necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by the fire.

To deliberately sit down in the morning to read a novel, to enjoy yourself, is this not, in New England (I am told they don’t read much in other parts of the country), the sin of sins?  Have you any right to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical?  Have you any right to enjoy yourself at all until the fag-end of the day, when you are tired and incapable of enjoying yourself?  I am aware that this is the practice, if not the theory, of our society,—­to postpone the delights of social intercourse until after dark, and rather late at night, when body and mind are both weary with the exertions of business, and when we can give to what is the most delightful and profitable thing in life, social and intellectual society, only the weariness of dull brains and over-tired muscles.  No wonder we take our amusements sadly, and that so many people find dinners heavy and parties stupid.  Our economy leaves no place for amusements; we merely add them to the burden of a life already full.  The world is still a little off the track as to what is really useful.