THE “ BEST ROOM.” 
BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
There was a parlor in the house, a room 
To make you shudder with its prudish gloom, 
The furniture stood round with such an air, 
There seemed to he a ghost in every chair; 
Each looked as it had scuttled to its place, 
And pulled extempore a Sunday face, 
Too suugly proper for a world of sin, 
Like hoys on whom the minister comes in. 
The table fronting you with icy stare, 
Strove to look witless that its legs were hare, 
While the black sofa, with its liorse-hair pall, 
Gloomed like the bier for comfort’s funeral. 
Two pictures graced the wall in grimmest troth, 
Mister and Mistress W. in their youth— 
New England youth, that seems a sort of pill, 
Half wish I dared, half Edwards on the will, 
Bitter to swallow, and which leaves a trace 
Of Calvinistic colic on the face. 
Between them o’er the mantel hung in state 
Solomon’s temple done in copper plate; 
was a flutter of leaves and a great deal of buzzing as 
the little yellow heads bent over the book, and finally 
laughed outright. 
“Children, where’s your mother?” sternly de¬ 
manded Deacon Barnes. 
“ Ellen, Ellen,” he shouted. “I think you might 
keep these children quiet on the Sabbath. They won’t 
allow me to think. 
Ellen had been awake all night with a fretful baby. 
She had hushed him, and had just fallen asleep when 
her husband’s voice aroused her and woke the 
baby. 
“ Please send them up-stairs,” she said wearily. 
And all that sultry afternoon she amused the three 
children in a close, upper room, while her husband 
rocked and fanned himself, and thought of Heaven. 
A Christian man was dying in Scotland. His 
daughter Nellie sat by his bedside. It was Sunday 
evening, and the bell of the Scotch kirk was ringing, 
calling the people to church. The old man in his dy¬ 
ing dream thought that he was on his way to church 
in his sleigh across the river; and as the evening bell 
struck up, in his dying dream he thought it was the 
call to church.He said : “ Hark, the bells are ringing; 
we shall be late; we must make the mare step out 
quick! ”—He shivered, and then said : “ Pull the robe 
up closer, my lass ! It is cold crossing the river, but 
we will soon be there! And he smiled and said: 
“ Just there now ! ”—No wonder he smiled. The good 
old man had gone to church. Not to the old Scotch 
kirk, but to the temple in the skies. Just across the 
river. 
The Detroit Free Press tells about an 
urchin who was seated on the post-office 
steps of that city going through a water¬ 
melon, when a man halted and asked: 
“This is a great town for hogs, isn’t it 
bub?” “ Wall, no,” drawled "the lad, as 
he filled his mouth again and kept his eyes 
on the man; “you’ll be awful lonesome 
here! ” 
Invention pure, but meet, we may presume, 
To give some scripture sanction to the room. 
Facing this last, two samplars you might see, 
Each with its urn and stiffly weeping tree, 
Devoted to some memory long ago 
More faded than their lines of worsted woe; 
Cut paper decked the frame against the flies, 
Though none e’er dared an entrance who 
were wise, 
And blushed asparagus, in fading green, 
Added its shiver to the Franklin clean. 
When first arrived, I chilled a half horn- there, 
Nor dared deflower with use a single chair; 
I caught no cold, yet flying pains could find 
For weeks in me—a rheumatism of mind. 
DEACON BARNES’ SUNDAY. 
“ Beautiful! beautiful!!” mentally ejac¬ 
ulated Deacon Barnes, at the close of a 
morning sermon about heaven. “ Those 
are my ideas exactly.” 
And so enwrapped was he with his 
thoughts, as he passed out of the church, 
he forgot to ask lame old Mrs. Howe to 
ride home with him, as was his usual 
custom. 
“ Perhaps it is well,” he thought, “for 
she is a worldly old woman and would 
probably have drawn my thoughts away 
from Heaven. 
At the dinner table, his sou exclaimed : 
“Oh, father, 1 have got a situation at last!” 
“ Have you forgotten that it is Sunday, 
John ? ” asked the father, sternly. “Don’t 
let me hear any more such talk.” 
John ate his dinner in silence. How 
could his situation he a wrong thing to 
speak of on Sunday. He was so thank¬ 
ful for it that it seemed to come from the 
hand of God. God knew all about the 
restless months in which he had answered 
an advertisement every week. 
When the minister gave thanks in 
church for all the mercies of the past week, 
John’s heart gave a grateful throb, and 
he determined now to acknowledge God 
in all his ways. 
John ate his dinner in silence, while 
his father thought about Heaven. 
In the afternoon Mr. Barnes’ nephew, a stranger in 
that place, came over from his boarding place opposite, 
and sat on the piazza talking with John. 
“ I can’t allow this, Tom,” said Mr. Barnes, coming 
to the door with his Bible in his hands; “ you must 
not sit here breaking the Sabbath. Go hack to your 
boarding house and read some good book.” 
Tom started up angrily, and spent the afternoon 
fishing and bathing with an old colored man, his only 
acquaintance in the place, while Deacon Barnes sat in 
a large rocker on the piazza, with a handkerchief over 
his face, and thought about Heaven. 
Presently his two little daughters came out on the 
piazza with a picture book and sat near him. There 
Hard on Pimpkins. Pimpkius. Don’t 
you know Pimpkins? Then you don’t 
know the daintiest, darlingest, most fash¬ 
ionable and most fastidious self-admirer 
that ever lisped and languished in a 
drawing-room. Pimpkins was at Mrs. 
Bonycastle’s party last winter. One or 
the company was a blooming damsel from 
the country—a fresh, rosy-cheeked, bright- 
faced girl, over whom the impressible bach¬ 
elors were in ecstasies. Pimpkins saw and 
admired. Pimpkins determined to make 
an impression; stared at her through his 
quizzing glass until he stared her out or 
countenance. Then he approached her. 
She was knitting over socks for one of 
Mrs. Bonycastle s children. “ Aw,” said 
Pimpkins. “Knitting, ’ponhona. Twoo- 
ly iudustwious. Now, do you know I 
like to see a young lady industwious. It’s 
a good sign. I like to encouwage indus- 
twy. Aw—what would you charge to knit 
me a pair like that? ” “Socks or stock¬ 
ings d< i you want, Mr. Pimpkius ? ” “Aw! 
deuced if I exactly understand—hut, aw 
—I want ’em to come up over the calf, 
you know.” “ In that case,” replied the 
blooming, damsel, smiling a sweet, inno¬ 
cent smile, “ I should have to estimate. 
I never knit a pair to cover one’s whole 
body.” Pimpkins was observed at the 
side-board shortly afterward trying to eat 
a half-melted ice with a fork. 
One night, recently, a Detroit policeman, passing a 
certain house about 10 o’clock, saw a man drop from 
a window, and heard smothered cries inside. He 
seized the man for a burglar, but soon found that he 
had the owner of the house in his clutches. “Well,” 
said the officer, “it looked suspicious to see you drop 
out of a window that way.” “ Well, replied the man, 
heaving a sigh, “ when the old woman gets her dan¬ 
der up I ain’t particular about what road I take to get 
out of the house.” 
In giving geography lessons down East, a teacher 
asked a boy what State he lived in, and was amused 
at the reply, drawled through the boy’s nose, “A 
state of sin and misery.” 
Le Mala die Imaginative. 
Leaning a Little. —A negro once said in a prayer 
meeting: “ Bredren, when I was a hoy I took a 
hatchet and went into the woods. When I found a tree 
dat was straight and big and solid, I didn’t touch dat 
tree; hut when I found one leaning a little and holler 
inside, I soon had him down. So when the debil goes 
after Christians he don’t touch dem that stand straight 
and true, hut dem dat lean a. little and are holler inside. 
“Boy,” said a traveler to a disobedient youth 
whom he had encountered, “don’t you hear your 
father speaking to you ? ” “ Oh ! y-a-a-s,” replied the 
youth; “but I don’t mind what he says. Mother 
don’t neither; and ’twixt she and I we’ve about got 
the old dog so he don’t.” 
