WINTER MEETING. 211 



I will mention but f^ur of those accessories of home life which especially tend 

 "toward what we call culture. 



These are books, pictures, flowers, music. If we wish our children to love 

 home and be loath to leave it ; if we wish our homes to build up to better and 

 better, and to be refined and refining, helpful, attractive and restful, we cannot 

 afford to be without at least the first three of these, t am not sure that we can 

 afford to have less than all the entire four. 



As to the books : We live in an age when books are placed beside bread among 

 the necessaries of life. We should as soon think of doing without books as with- 

 out the modern appliances of labor. Time was when our ancestors had no books ; 

 indeed, as a general thing, they could neither read nor write. Centuries later 

 they had a Bible, an almanac, and a book on farriery or the veterinary art. We 

 have passed the age when so few books suffice, just as we have passed the age when 

 people used a sharpened log for a plow-share, or dibbled the ground with a pointed 

 stick when they wished to plant a garden. 



Besides the Bible, which has made progress possible, we now place on our 

 home book-shelves a long and glorious list of books of poetry, history, essays, 

 philosophy, travels, science, biography, romance, to fill, enrich and beautify our 

 lives. The home without books falls behind its age. It is not only laggard in 

 refinement, but its finances are administered in a meager and the crudest manner ; 

 its money is earned in the hardest methods and brings the poorest returns. 1 could 

 illustrate, but I forbear. Look about you. 



Next to books I would place pictures as means of culture in the home. I do 

 not here intend a rough print of a prize ox, or of a mammoth cabbage, not a coarse 

 chromo of the impossible, but some picture or pictures which minister to thought 

 and elevate sentiment, cultivate taste and present a moral lesson. The pictures 

 may be steel engravings, or merely wood-cuts, but let them be good of their kind. 

 Let us remember that these pictures are the child's first teachers, next to his 

 mother's smile. Before he can read he can catch the object-lesson in the picture. 

 The walls of his home will then be associated in his memory with beauty, refine- 

 ment, some good uplifting thought, which shall rebuke the violent, the coarse and 

 the evil. 



Now-a-days pictures are almost as easily obtainable as books. What hundreds 

 •of really good pictures are thrown away, torn up, generally neglected and destroyed, 

 because they have come to us in papers or magazines. 



I think it would be hard for anyone to buy of me a collection of wood- cues 

 which I have saved and mounted on white card-board within the last 20 years ; 

 not a dozen of them have been purchased as pictures, but now, numbering several 

 hundred, they are a collection valuable as illustrating contemporaneous art. 

 Make portfolios of pictures and stand them in the corners of the family room ; 

 they will furnish subjects for conversation; the young folks will enjoy showing 

 them to their guests ; one of the sons or daughters can make an easel for them ; 

 make scrap-books of pictures to lay on the tables. I think some; one tells us of a 

 wonderful screen of pictures made by Jane Carlyle. 



When I say "let us have fljwers in the house as a means of culture for the 

 family," I touch a theme peculiarly congenial to this gathering. When I walk 

 through a village or drive through the country roads, and see verandas covered 

 with vines, beds and boxes of flowers here and there, hedges neatly trimmed, orna- 

 mental trees on the lawn ; when I see preparation for house plants in the winter, 

 if it is no more than a few tin cans with slips of geraniums, loutennes and parlor 



