XXII.

IN CONCLUSION.

In looking over our list of Home Amusements--the private theatricals, the tableaux vivants, the brain games, the fortune-telling, the making of screens, the painting of fans, etc.; the games at cards, the etching, the lawn tennis, the dancing, the garden party, the window gardens, the birds, the picnics, the plaque-painting, the archery, the parlor and the kitchen--we can only feel how much we have left out. Why have we not spoken more fully of the library, with its quiet and respectable arm-chairs, its green table, its shelves filled with those silent friends who never desert us, its paper-cutter, its wood-fire, its latest magazine, its quiet, and the heavy curtain dropped at evening? How did we happen to so slight this delightful room, wherein so many of the best amusements of home are always arranging themselves? Perhaps because the story told itself, and we did not need to tell it.

How could we have forgotten the quest for green apples and choke-cherries in the spring, or the subsequent repentance? the bird-snaring and nesting? and in summer the search for wild flowers? the attempts at making an herbarium? the berry-picking? the nutting in the fall? that cracking of butternuts by the winter fire? that arrangement of the autumn-leaves?

Simply because the record of Home Amusements is endless. It is almost all of life which is worth remembering.

But we can not leave the reader here, particularly if that kindly personage be a young lady, without congratulating her upon the age in which she exists. She finds vastly more to amuse her in her home-life than her mother or her grandmother did before her. They were content to receive once a month “The Lady’s Book,” with a few hints as to lace-work, worsted-work, patterns for the embroidering of slippers or sofa-cushions. A new suggestion for embroidery on white cambric, or, through a friend in some great mart of fashion, the cut pattern of an article of dress--think of that, ye who get the fashions by telegraph. Dress itself was a crude thing compared to what it is now. There was not even at Newport the slightest approximation to the luxury of to-day. A “London-made” habit, for instance, was almost unknown. There was no “riding to hounds,” no skating rink, no casino; there were quiet dinners, and very many “Germans,” but they were conducted inexpensively, at the hotels almost universally.

Of course, New York and Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, offered an exciting life to the prominent and fashionable women of the day for a few weeks of the season. But the long life at home of the rank and file, the severe winters, during whose rigors the ardent and ambitious and pleasure-loving were shut up for months behind four dreary walls, were not illumined by patterns of artistic fancy-work from South Kensington, or by the delightful knowledge of china painting. No ingenious boy or girl thought of cutting or carving in wood beyond the vulgar whittling, which all good housekeepers condemned. The elderly lady sat about with her knitting--very plain knitting at that. The crochet-needle had not then begun that endless chain which has since united our vast continent in a network of elaborate tidies, and covered our babies with delicate flannel Josies, or given us, for the head and neck, the softest of wraps. The sewing-machine had not begun its prodigious march down our long seams. People did much “plain sewing,” but knew not of artistic curtains made of cheesecloth, or of unbleached muslin elaborated into Roman scarfs--a singular marriage, by the way, of Lowell and its looms with the Eternal City, all of which they know now.

Young ladies had not then been taught to draw and paint artistically, sincerely, as they are taught to-day. The education in music was infinitely less thorough. It was an age when the person who aspired to the accomplishments had much to contend against. There were but few railroads which penetrated to the remote villages; and it must be confessed that life had its dull evenings.

But around the one astral lamp which then shed its uncertain rays upon the family circle there were the same elements of which human society is now composed, and there was one amusement present whose absence we now sometimes have to regret. We refer to that lost art of conversation which has, it would seem, departed from our busy last half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it has left the whole world, if we can believe Cornelius O’Dowd, Mrs. Stowe, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, and even some French writers. Mrs. Stowe, in one of her books of early New England life, referring to the art of conversation, speaks feelingly of the change. Young ladies were driven by the very dullness of their lives to be readers of good books. There were many admirable historical scholars and Shakespeareans among the New England girls of a past generation. They read Milton and John Bunyan, and the early essayists and poets. Their novels had been written for them by Walter Scott and Miss Austen, and they were an education in themselves.

And conversation, such as we do not hear often, lighted up those long winter evenings. Perhaps, too, this very quiet and dullness was helping to forge the armor of some heroine who was to take her part in civilizing the West. Certainly it made some great women. However, as we take account of what little we may have lost, we are very grateful for all we have gained. Our present civilization rubs out individuality, no doubt. Life is smothered in appliances.

What is called the higher education of women, and the very superior culture now possible, may not have yet made a race of good talkers, but it has undoubtedly made an army of thinkers.

It certainly has helped to fill the country with refined and happy girls, who have no reason to complain of repression. It would seem almost impossible to find now the repressed, morbid, undeveloped, and crushed natures which a gloomy religion and a lingering of Puritan prejudice made almost too common in early New England. Many of those women still live, and have found expression in literature to tell us how devoid their homes were of amusement.

The world is not filled with geniuses, or with those fortunate people who can evolve an amusing life from out of the depths of their inner consciousness. We may, therefore, be very grateful for every innocent amusement. Indeed, we may be very grateful that amateur concerts, little operettas, cantatas, musical clubs, are now common, and that the performers, young ladies of all ranks and classes, are admirably trained in music; that in decorative art industries they are no longer novices, but deserving of the higher name of artist.

All these better developments of the mind and power of each inmate can not but render home interesting, gay, cheerful, happy, blessed.

And all the Home Amusements should be made, or studied to be made, the amusements of the whole.

No pursuit or pleasure can be carried on in the best spirit without being in some measure unselfish if it conduces to the amusement of home. Thus the indulgence of a favorite taste may have the beauty of philanthropy in it, if it is made to help along the cheerfulness of home.

There are some trades which are solitary and exclusive. Authorship is one of these; and perhaps the author is not always a very amusing inmate. But the actor in the private play, the clever and ready wit who makes the charade lively, the musician, the embroideress, the fortune-teller, the good partner at whist, the clever amateur cook, and the artistic member--these can all add to Home Amusements.

THE END.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] This was the invention of a poor poet named Dulot, who found rhymes for other poets.

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