I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or anything else which is good and requires a fresh mind; and I take it that nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.  I suppose it is necessary that business should be transacted; though the amount of business that does not contribute to anybody’s comfort or improvement suggests the query whether it is not overdone.  I know that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don’t know what success is.  There is a man, whom we all know, who built a house that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and furnished it for another like sum, who does not know anything more about architecture, or painting, or books, or history, than he cares for the rights of those who have not so much money as he has.  I heard him once, in a foreign gallery, say to his wife, as they stood in front of a famous picture by Rubens:  “That is the Rape of the Sardines!” What a cheerful world it would be if everybody was as successful as that man!  While I am reading my book by the fire, and taking an active part in important transactions that may be a good deal better than real, let me be thankful that a great many men are profitably employed in offices and bureaus and country stores in keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions among mankind, so much of which is made to appear to the women at home as “business.”  I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men in this world that is not held in disrepute.  When the time comes that I have to prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be remembered in my favor that I made this admission.  If it is true, as a witty conservative once said to me, that we never shall have peace in this country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to be rectus in curia early.

IV

The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon other scenes.  We like to read of the small, bare room, with cobwebbed ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of genius sits with his magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and enchantment.  I think the open fire does not kindle the imagination so much as it awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling embers and ashy grayness, rather than the future.  People become reminiscent and even sentimental in front of it.  They used to become something else in those good old days when it was thought best to heat the poker red hot before plunging it into the mugs of flip.  This heating of the poker has been disapproved of late years, but I do not know on what grounds; if one is to drink bitters and gins and the like, such as I understand as good people as clergymen and women take in private, and by advice, I do not know why one should not make them palatable and heat them with his own poker.  Cold whiskey out of a bottle, taken as a prescription six times a day on the sly, is n’t my idea of virtue any more than the social ancestral glass, sizzling wickedly with the hot iron.  Names are so confusing in this world; but things are apt to remain pretty much the same, whatever we call them.