HOUSE-WARMING. 
263 
cell, and told to make yourself at home there, — in 
solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not ad¬ 
mit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build 
one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality 
is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. 
There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he 
had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have 
been on many a man’s premises, and might have been 
legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been 
in many men’s houses. I might visit in my old clothes 
a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I 
have described, if I were going their way; but backing 
out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to 
learn, if ever I am caught in one. 
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors 
would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver 
wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its sym¬ 
bols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far 
fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in 
other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and 
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a din¬ 
ner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough 
to Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. 
How can the scholar, who dwells away in the North 
West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is par- 
ham entary in the kitchen ? 
However, only one or two of my guests were ever 
bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding with me; 
but when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a 
hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to 
its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a great 
many hasty-puddings. 
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought 
