72 FARM HOMES, IN -DOORS AND OUT-DOORS. 



let not the whole house be made dismal because of it ; 

 but rejoice that there is a kitchen, that there are com- 

 fortable bedrooms, and that there is a bit of Heaven m 

 the form of a flower garden under the windows ! 



I know a good woman, the wife of a hard-working and 

 not very wealthy farmer, who has spent years of her life 

 toiling and scrimping and pinching herself and her 

 family to the one end of having a handsome parlor and a 

 handsome spare bedroom furnished after her own heart. 

 She has them now the bright Brussels carpet, the lace 

 curtains, the upholstered chairs, the gilt-framed mirror, 

 the glittering wall-paper, the richly bound Bible, the 

 marble-topped table, the "pair" of mammoth heavily 

 framed pictures, and in the bedroom the magnificent bed 

 and all its appropriate surroundings. There is not even 

 an embroidered sofa cushion, or fancy match safe, or 

 gorgeous tidy, lacking. And over all this grandeur, for 

 it is quite grand for that small farming hamlet, reigns 

 profound shadow and silence. Sometimes on Sunday 

 afternoon a gray-haired and rather unhappy-faced woman 

 opens one of the shutters just enough to admit the ghost 

 of a sunbeam and sits down by the window the solitary 

 monarch of all the fine things about her. Her two boys 

 have grown up and branched off into existence that has 

 no "farming" in it. Her poor husband mightily pre- 

 fers the kitchen or the back porch to the sacred splendors 

 of the "front room," which he never enters without a 

 mortal fear of doing some damage. So the parlor is her 

 very own. It is too nice for the church sociable, and too 

 large to throw open to "just the neighbors," and so it 

 waits m shadow and silence like a very orderly sepulchre 

 in which the good woman will one day he in state, all 

 unmindful of the neighbors' feet upon her sacred carpet. 

 And this seems to be all that her Best Room amounts to. 



"Nevertheless, it is pleasant," exclaims some reader, 

 "to have one room m the house that is always in order 



