beams, the uprights and the roofing of the building.

The chats, more or less confidential and altogether unconventional,
which I propose to hold with the readers of this modest volume have to
do with certain sub-laws which are so often overlooked that--to return
to the figure of the building--the wind finds its way through chinks;
the floors creak and the general impression is that of bare
homeliness. House and Home go together upon tongue and upon pen as
naturally as hook-and-eye, shovel-and-tongs, knife-and-fork,--yet
the coupling is rather a trick learned through habit than an act of
reason. The words are not synonyms of necessity or in fact.

Upon these, the first pages of my unconventional book, I avow my
knowledge of what, so far from humiliating, stimulates me--to wit,
that nine-tenths of those who will look beyond the title-page will be
women. This is well, and as I would have it to be, for without
feminine agency no house, however well appointed, can be anything
higher than an official residence.

Man's first possession in a world then unmarred by sin was a
dwelling-place--but Eden was not a home until the woman joined him
there. Throughout the ages and all over the world, as mother, wife,
sister, daughter (often, let me observe in passing, as old-maid aunt)
she has stood with him as the representative of the rest, sympathy and
love to be found nowhere except under his own roof-tree, and beside
his own fireside. It is not the house that makes the home, any more
than it is the jeweled case that makes the watch, or the body that
makes the human being. It is the Presence, the nameless influence
which is the earliest acknowledged by the child, and the latest to be
forgotten by man or woman. The establishment of this power is