Stepping Stones to Happiness: Second Index Page

Under Green Boughs. They who best cherish this family tradition, and this family feeling, are they who most value the home and its influences and are eager to make it all that is good for its various members. For a home is the best of all the stepping stones to happiness. Where the home may be is a matter of comparatively little importance beside the character of the home itself. Wherever it is, in city or in country, its occupants will probably congratulate themselves that their lives are better spent than if it were in the other place. There is so much less to distract the attention and so much more to help toward the concentration of thought in the loneliness of rural regions that people there are wont to think the absence of frivolity among them is a question past dispute, although perhaps a circumstance on which they have no right to pride themselves, since they can hardly claim a voluntary agency in this affair of the favor of Providence, but which, if not to be set down to their credit, certainly is to their advantage. In the city, they reason, are the unceasing entertainments of all sorts, complicated and simple, lectures, concerts, theatres, operas, crowds on Sundays at the churches where this choice singer or that draws a large salary, picture stores, galleries, libraries, exhibitions of things from the four corners of the earth, morning calls, strolls down thoroughfares as good as foreign lands, dinner parties, afternoon teas, one perpetual round of change and excitement, not the least part of which is the mere observation of the throngs that line the streets, with the equipages and the wayfarers streets which to the rustic are a theatrical entertainment in themselves, of which one is not immediately wearied ; and in the mean time when life in the country has subsided to quiet sleep, it is under full headway in the town for hours afterward.

• Comparative Views of Town and Country
• The Love of Nature
• Michelet's Twilight Experience
• Sunlight
  

Vine and Fig Tree. But if the house is in what is called the country or on the country's edge, we shall find another stepping stone to happiness in the possession and cultivation of a garden, and if we live in town, still we love a garden. Every man loves his own garden. It is the delight and the desire of the farmer's wife and the dream of the old sailor coming off the sea. The turning up of the earth is in obedience to one of the natural instincts, perhaps almost the only inheritance we carried with us out of the Garden of Eden. Gardening indeed, or rather the pretty pottering round a garden, directing somebody else with the heavy work, and attending one's self to the picturesque, is an occupation than which there is none pleasanter, as all those know who are blessed with a bit of ground. The first pulling over of last year's flower bed is like coming back from long absence and enjoying the society of a mother; and as strength and vigor come to us while we meddle with the soft brown soil of the healing and purifying earth, we easily understand that Antaeus as well as Adam was a gardener.

• The Garden
• An Old-Fashioned Garden
• The Almanac
• The Apple Tree
• Woman in Agriculture
• Among the Lake Dwellings
• A Picturesque Sight
• Mrs. Royal's Garden
  

The House in the Country. One approaches the house through the garden, and having made sure of a pleasaunce there, it is tolerably certain that the house is going to be a sort of a pleasaunce, too. In the first place ,it has been oriented in the right way, squared to the southeast, so that the sun comes into every room in it at least once a day, and in some rooms lies all day long. Besides being supplied with this wealth of sun, it has been remembered that another requisite of health, and so of happiness, is pure water; and care has been taken that the well, if there is no high-spring to pipe into the house, is more than a hundred feet from any drain, and so a multitude of poisonous microbes has been kept at a distance. And when everything else to give comfort in the house has been foreseen, one thing more will be thought of, and almost before the house is built its owners shall make sure of a piazza.

• The Piazza
• The Furnishing
• The Parlor
• The Library
• The Dining-Room
• The Rosillon House

In a Dangerous Place. In obtaining this house which is to be so dear a shelter, be it on the asphalt or under the green bough, we have of course been particular about the site, for it may be "writ large but the country is healthful only when it is healthful," and this sanitary condition is not to be taken for granted. Rosebushes in the door-yard in too frequent cases supersede drain-tiles under it, and the cupola too rarely holds a ventilating shaft. In the city there are many houses that are built over old water courses, and the wouldbe occupant is wise when he procures an old map of the city, which will let him know whether or not he is subject to this danger.
      It is the houses built over these old choked or diverted water courses, whose occupants are the sufferers from malaria. In the country house the chief risks to health come from the pollution of the water sup- ply, and of the air, by contact with waste matter. Owners of property are left to build or not to build their drains and to bestow them perhaps as ignorance and indolence prompts, with no official supervision, and the conscequence is, that sometimes the loveliest spots are nests of low fever, diphtheria and dysentery.

•  Rock and Gravel.
• The Cellar
• The Prevention that Is Better than Cure
• The Only Curse on the House
• We or Providence to Blame?
• Children's Diseases
• Disinfectants
• The Scarlet Fever
• The Children of the Poor
• The Lively Fly
• At Autumn Time
• The Birds When the Days Shorten
• Light-Hearted October
• Autumn Cheer
• By the Hearth

Light of the House. Not a house as fine as Aladdin's palace will give us the stepping stone to happiness that we have expected it to be if it is not inhabited by certain fine and sweet spirits. And first of all these is the mother. It is one of the time-honored beliefs, old enough, those observers who have but a poor opinion of the modern society mother are saying, to have reached a foolish dotage, or old enough to know better, as you please that there is no love like mother-love, as a modern poet phrases it; and it is true in so far as it implies that there ought to be no love like mother's love ; but as mothers are as fallible as wives and daughters and sisters, we too frequently meet specimens of them that make us think that if there is no love like mother's love, we are glad of it, and we should think that children would be, too.

• A Mother
• The Ideal Mother
• The Every-Day Mother
• The Story of Old Margaret and Her Son

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