Backlog Studies | Page 7

light of a pine-knot, it was not difficult to get the sweet spirit of them
from the countenance of the serene mother knitting in the
chimney-corner.

III
When the fire is made, you want to sit in front of it and grow genial in
its effulgence. I have never been upon a throne,--except in moments of
a traveler's curiosity, about as long as a South American dictator
remains on one,--but I have no idea that it compares, for pleasantness,
with a seat before a wood-fire. A whole leisure day before you, a good
novel in hand, and the backlog only just beginning to kindle, with
uncounted hours of comfort in it, has life anything more delicious? For
"novel" you can substitute "Calvin's Institutes," if you wish to be
virtuous as well as happy. Even Calvin would melt before a wood-fire.
A great snowstorm, visible on three sides of your wide-windowed room,
loading the evergreens, blown in fine powder from the great
chestnut-tops, piled up in ever accumulating masses, covering the paths,
the shrubbery, the hedges, drifting and clinging in fantastic deposits,
deepening your sense of security, and taking away the sin of idleness
by making it a necessity, this is an excellent ground to your day by the
fire.
To deliberately sit down in the morning to read a novel, to enjoy
yourself, is this not, in New England (I am told they don't read much in
other parts of the country), the sin of sins? Have you any right to read,
especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in
some employment that is called practical? Have you any right to enjoy
yourself at all until the fag-end of the day, when you are tired and
incapable of enjoying yourself? I am aware that this is the practice, if

not the theory, of our society,--to postpone the delights of social
intercourse until after dark, and rather late at night, when body and
mind are both weary with the exertions of business, and when we can
give to what is the most delightful and profitable thing in life, social
and intellectual society, only the weariness of dull brains and over-tired
muscles. No wonder we take our amusements sadly, and that so many
people find dinners heavy and parties stupid. Our economy leaves no
place for amusements; we merely add them to the burden of a life
already full. The world is still a little off the track as to what is really
useful.
I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or
anything else which is good and requires a fresh mind; and I take it that
nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind. I suppose
it is necessary that business should be transacted; though the amount of
business that does not contribute to anybody's comfort or improvement
suggests the query whether it is not overdone. I know that unremitting
attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what
success is. There is a man, whom we all know, who built a house that
cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and furnished it for another like
sum, who does not know anything more about architecture, or painting,
or books, or history, than he cares for the rights of those who have not
so much money as he has. I heard him once, in a foreign gallery, say to
his wife, as they stood in front of a famous picture by Rubens: "That is
the Rape of the Sardines!" What a cheerful world it would be if
everybody was as successful as that man! While I am reading my book
by the fire, and taking an active part in important transactions that may
be a good deal better than real, let me be thankful that a great many
men are profitably employed in offices and bureaus and country stores
in keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions among
mankind, so much of which is made to appear to the women at home as
"business." I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men in this
world that is not held in disrepute. When the time comes that I have to
prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be remembered
in my favor that I made this admission. If it is true, as a witty
conservative once said to me, that we never shall have peace in this
country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to be rectus
in curia early.

IV
The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon
other scenes. We like to read of the small, bare room, with cobwebbed
ceiling