tality has been reduced to a very complete system; which, though elastic enough to admit of variations to suit the ever changing methods and means of social life, has at the back of all certain fixed rules that both host and guest are bound to respect. In this country we have equal, indeed I believe greater heartiness of hospitality, but we lose much of its good effect by certain false notions, and a careless disregard of mutual rights. The Americans, says a French journalist of note, "are a people who pour themselves out like water; they waste themselves in their violent attempts to be courteous. They heap their civilities upon a man until his back is well-nigh broken with the burden; to make a man happy they fling their efforts at his head like paving stones. They do it all so spontaneously withal that one cannot help but feel a sense of gratitude cropping up through his discomfort; and that to repel their cruel good intentions, would be contemptible." There is a good deal of exaggeration in this expression of opinion, but there is a good deal of truth at the bottom of it. We often over-do our hospitality, as we over-do many of our social undertakings; and make a burden for a man when we intend to provide a pleasure. The one cardinal principle of hospitality is to do much for our guest, without seeming to do anything requiring a special effort on our own part. The stranger within our gates should be made to feel perfectly at ease, without any apparent effort on the part of the host. We should not seem to put our guests under an obligation to us;-when hospitality is reduced to a mere matter of exchange of civilities-so many weeks' board at my house to be repaid by an equivalent attention from you-it ceases to be hospitality and becomes a mere matter of barter; a thing that belongs to trade and not to friendship. Of course, I do not mean to say that there is not something of mutual benefit in all hospitality, but it is a thing to be put one side and wholly lost sight of, so far as the host is himself concerned, and on the part of the guest to be set down to gratitude and not obligation. If I am entertained by some friend I am not to rack my brains for a

way to repay him, but am never to lose an opportunity for the expression of my gratitude. If you give to your friend the use of your house, and feed him from your table for a certain length of time, and set it down as a debt to be discharged by him in a like manner at some future time, you do not treat him as well as you treat the tramp whom you feed on your door-step.

Hospitality can never reach its highest development in America till it is freed of the taint of our national sin-ostentation. Whether we entertain as a nation or as individuals we disturb the order of our lives, not that our guest may be comfortable, but that he may be impressed with our material prosperity. If an Emperor or a Prince ever visits our shores, we cast him into a maelstrom of sight-seeing that drags him away from what is best and most beautiful, and most orderly in our national life. We make bim dance in halls less beautiful than his own halls; eat at dinners not as well cooked as his own home dinners; review troops that are but a travesty of his own armies, and worst of all, make him listen to speeches that have more sound than sense, and more words than wisdom. Now and then a visitor rebels against this kind of treatment, and persists in quietly studying our institutions. That wise ruler, Dom Pedro, cared far more to see how we managed our national industries, how we cared for our poor and our criminals, and how we educated our children than to listen to the fulsome platitudes of chronic after-dinner babblers, or to see how well our women looked and danced at a ball, or to have a visible demonstration of how many butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers we could get to don tawdry uniforms, and march about our streets. Within a score of years the whole country has had two spasms of gay madness over the visits of two sons of European rulers. Those who remember these visits will not be likely to contradict me when I say that neither the Prince of Wales nor the Grand Duke Alexis gained as much knowledge of the real strength and the solid resources of the country, as he could have gathered from a careful reading of any half-dozen reliable books on

those subjects. We did not of course dazzle them with our troops or our civic celebrations, or befool them into the belief that they saw us in our normal condition; they knew they were seeing America under exceptional circumstances, and though they were bound to be civil, and treat our good intentions with respect, they would probably much rather have been left more to their own inclinations, and less at the mercy of reception and entertainment committees. In more ways than one we did these young scions of royalty a moral wrong, and would have been equally guilty toward Dom Pedro if he had not had the moral courage to resent being made the central figure in a show. The Grand Duke Alexis and the Prince of Wales came to study the country and its institutions; and we robbed them of the possibility of doing so. They came to study us as a people, and we immediately put away from them all that was best in our republican life, and instead of standing before them in dignified simplicity, we arrayed ourselves in flaunting rags of ostentation.

And what is true of our national hospitality is true to a great measure in the hospitality of our homes. We make an innovator of our guest. Who has not made a visit when he has felt that his presence created a revolution in the whole domestic economy. We think we hide the effort, but the guest knows if the whole establishment is sustaining an immense and unnecessary strain to provide for his entertainment. The family comforts are entirely hidden; and the "company" discomforts are paraded everywhere. The guest feels as if the house had been especially "swept and garnished for him;" and to carry out the suggestion of the quotation, that he is very much like an evil spirit entered into it. The host does himself a wrong and does the guest a wrong. The guest is put in the position of one whose delight is in a glazed formality; and the host, deprived of his comfortably worn fire-side chair, his slipshod slippers and his easy dressing-gown, finds himself playing a part that gives him no pleasure. The guest is given plenty of plate, elegantly appointed rooms, choice

food and a downy bed, but the host hides away the best part of himself beneath a cloak of pretension, and has a contempt for himself for doing so.

The truly hospitable man should never be so much himself as when he has a guest in the house. Our best self should be the home self, and there should be no guest in our houses who does not love us for what the home self reveals in us. When the friend crosses your threshold, forget what you have or have not to give him in the way of material comforts, and let your whole soul go out in a benediction of welcome. Do less than this and you will give your friend a heart chill as he enters in. O, the pang of going to visit some dear old friend, perhaps a college chum or a playmate of your childhood, and finding yourself among strangers! To find the well at which we have drunk many a draught of sweetest familiar intercourse all frozen over that is disappointment indeed. We put out our hand to grasp a hand that "lang syne" we have held warmly and lovingly in ours, and we find it gloved in mail. We enter a house where we expect to find welcome, and we find formality. We strive to stay our time out, and then go home with a heavy heart, very sure that the world is hollow, and our most cherished doll stuffed with the most unmistakable saw-dust. Our old friend, whom we have loved and honored and laughed and joked with, has given us the best that his upholsterer and his butcher and his servants could furnish; but of his own self we have found nothing but a lay figure. Such visits occur everywhere and every day, and never without doing a moral wrong to all concerned. There is discomfort for the host, discomfort for the guest, discomfort for the housewife. host thinks less of himself, the guest thinks less kindly of his host, and the housewife is made to bear a burden of extra care for no praiseworthy purpose.

The

True hospitality has nothing obtrusive or intrusive about it. It is as hearty and spontaneous as a kiss. He is the best host who knows how to take away from the heart of his guest the feeling that he is being entertained. A guest can never feel

quite at ease when he knows that he is expected to play the principal part in a pageant especially prepared for him. We verify the Frenchman's opinion, already mentioned, by undertaking too much for our guests. The tired literary man goes to visit at the house of a friend, and he finds that a dinner party has been arranged for him on the very first night of his arrival, and before the fatigue of his journey has worn off. He is expected to be beaming and lovable before a circle of people who are almost entire strangers to him. He feels that he is put very much at a disadvantage, but there is no escape for him. He tries to be brilliant, with the consciousness of being silly sitting heavily upon him. He tosses about all the night afterward by the nightmare of his conversational failure grievously tormented. The next morning there is a gathering at breakfast, and afterwards a drive and the sights of the neighborhood to be gone over. On general principles he hates sight-seeing, but cannot say so. In the afternoon there is another dinner at the house of some hospitable neighbor, and perhaps a concert or some other entertainment in the evening. The quiet hour with his old friend becomes next to an impossibility. He longs for a little rest, for the ineffable sweetness of being left alone; but such a boon is denied him. In some houses he might as well long for the moon. Willy-nilly he must be entertained, and so he drags through the weary days of his visit and is glad when it is over. Some of my readers will say that I am arguing from exceptions; but I will venture to say that every one who reads these pages will remember more than one such visit that he or she has made, and will agree with me when I say that there is not one host in fifty who knows how to entertain his guests without more or less of the restraint and discomfort of formality.

In France and in England they manage the matter of entertainment better than we do. The Englishman who invites you to his house makes his home your castle; and the Frenchman whose guest you are has so much social tact that he puts you at ease at once. In both countries all the

social plans for your entertainment are only arranged after your own will and inclination are consulted. There is about English society a barrier of reserve; but that once broken over, you are in the midst of the easiest and most delightful social system. The sense of freedom in an English country house is charming. You shoot, you drive, you walk, you join the other guests or remain in your room, as you like; and the whole establishment is pervaded with an atmosphere of country rest such as one expects to find only in the family. You are, indeed, for the time being adopted into the family, to share all its comforts and joys, while you are left free of all family perplexities. Between host and guest there is an honest recognition of individual rights and preferences, and the sense of personal freedom has so bracing an effect that the best social points of both are brought out to a remarkable degree. Yet all their easy social courtesy is governed by certain social laws as unvarying as the laws of the Medes and Persians. It is to a large degree the result of these laws, and until we adopt a similar code, we cannot have anything like a complete social system.

In America, hospitality is left too largely to chance. We make visits when we feel like it, or find it most convenient to do so, and think we have done our whole duty in the matter if we write a line and say we are going "if agreeable and convenient," '-as if the two conditions went necessarily together. In England it is considered the height of ill-breeding to go anywhere uninvited; even intimate friends do not consider themselves absolved from this rule. In England the terms of an invitation, too, are made very definite. You are asked to come at a certain time, and the limit of your stay is indicated. When your time is up you are expected to go away, and to consider the host's invitation to prolong your staysupposing he gives you one-as a mere polite form to which under ordinary circumstances you must return an equally polite but more sincere negative. How often a whole American household is thrown into a spasm of disarrangement by a prolonged visit. Mr. Smith comes for a week, and

Mrs. Jones is invited for the next week; or the cook has given her notice of leaving, or a house-cleaning campaign has been planned. When Mr. Smith's week is up he concludes to stay another week, and Mrs. Jones comes, and there is only one bed-room for both, or Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones may be uncongenial spirits, or the cook does leave, or the house-cleaning has to be put over; and so it happens that Mr. Smith put every body to a world of trouble, and when he does go you speed his going with a degree of heartiness not consistent with the spirit of hospitality, and are extremely careful how you invite him again. Why, I can count a score of men and women among my acquaintances that have visited away their friendship, simply because they hadn't the good sense to go home when the designated limit of their visit was reached.

In this paper I have not spoken particularly of balls and parties, and such other forms of entertainment as are wholly conventional. They are things that belong only to the border land of hospitality, when the word is taken in its best sense. Every man must at sometime or other find it in the line of his duty to receive and entertain his friends, but no man ever need give a ball or party. They are at best, for most people, stupid things; handsome rooms turned into a millinery show, with a dash of the florist's trade in the corners and on the stairs; and a little further on, a pastrycook's odorous display. Perhaps too, there is music-of anywhere least refining in a place like this; but useful enough to drown the discordant voices of a crowd who strive to out-sound each other in empty socialbabble. That is not hospitality, but a comedy in which all concerned play parts more or less silly, and withal a fruitful field for heart-burnings, envy, dyspepsia and some score more of soul and body evils.

True hospitality is a thing that touches the heart and never goes beyond the circle of generous impulses. Entertainment with the truly hospitable man means more than the mere feeding of the body; it means an interchange of soul gifts. Still it should have its laws, as all things good must have laws to govern them.

The obligation to be hospitable is a sacred one, emphasized by every moral code known to the world, and a practical outcome of the second great commandment.

There should never be a guest in the house whose presence requires any considerable change in the domestic economy.

However much the circumstances of business or mutual interests may demand in entertaining a stranger, he should never be taken into the family circle unless he is known to be wholly worthy of a place in that sanctum sanctorum of social life; but when once a man is admitted to the home fireside he should be treated as if the place had been his always.

The fact of an invitation gives neither host or guest the right to be master of the other's time, and does not require even a temporary sacrifice of one's entire individuality or pursuits.

A man should never be so much himself as when he entertains a friend.

To stay at a friend's house beyond the time for which one is invited is to perpetrate a social robbery.

To abide uninvited in a friend's house is as much a misdemeanor as borrowing his coat without his permission. It is debasing the coin of friendship to mere dross when a man attempts to make it pay his hotel bills.

The fact of two men having the same occupation and interests in life gives to neither a social right to the other's bed and board. A traveling minister has no more right to go uninvited to a fellow-preacher's house than a traveling shopkeeper or shoemaker has to go uninvited to the house of his fellow craftsman. Men are ordained to the ministry as preachers, teachers and pastors, and not as private hotel-keepers.

They who go into the country in summer as uninvited guests of their farmer friends should be rated as social brigands, and treated accordingly.

These few social maxims are by no means to be taken as a complete code of laws. Others quite as important will spring up out of the personal experience of every reader of this article, and the justice and equity of all may be tested by that infalli

ble standard of society-the Golden Rule. There can be no true hospitality that in practice is a violation of this rule; and you may safely rest assured that you have given

the fullest and most perfect measure of entertainment to your neighbor if you have done exactly as you would be done by. Wm. M. F. Round.

I.

IN the fifteenth century? But what difference does that make with a brave old city of the Netherlands? A hundred years, more or less, leave a light mark on such solid stuff as the Antwerpers built into their wide straight streets, their burly citadel, and their cathedral, famous even in famous days for its rare tall tower and magnificent walls. The city lay as fair and rich on the blue breast of the Scheldt, in those days as to-day; while the wooden shoes of the lace and carpet-weavers clattered busily through the streets, a countless flock of white sails filled the harbor, or glided by canals into the city's heart, and the long lace-trimmed waistcoat that every rosy burgher wore was hardly deep enough for the florins crowding in his

purse.

Indeed, the weight of these purses seemed almost the only serious trouble the Antwerpers knew in those days; ways and means must be found for relieving them; and it was a lucky morning, one of the rosiest of the burdened Burgomeister's thought, when he spied a lot of iron-rails, most skillfully and delicately wrought, awaiting sale.

"That is well; now I can have flowers around my garden as well as in it," said Herr Burgher, and he bought them all; but before they were fairly in their places, a new determination took possession of him, for every study of the rails brought their rare and exquisite designs more fully to his view.

"Now this will never do!" said Herr Burgher again, who like many of his Antwerp brothers needed his waistcoat large for his heart as well as for his florins; "only the hand of a genius ever finished such work as this, and genius must have

fame for its reward. And beside all that, a true artist is not so common a thing in Antwerp. Here, Vosterman!"-turning to a clerk,--" run to the iron-dealer and say I must know what workman sent him the rails I bought yesterday.”

Vosterman left the warehouse with a measured step, for the run of an Antwerper is not what we are accustomed to on this side of the water, and the answer was as slow in coming back, for it took time in those days for the iron-dealer to send a message twenty miles from the city, and hear from the forge-master again. But it came at last.

"And a poor answer, too, after all the trouble thy master has taken, Vosterman," said the iron-dealer. "It seems God is not always pleased to show us a wonder when we think we have found one, and those marvelous rails were only made by a boy after all;-a mere boy of fourteen, who hammers at his master's forge like any other blacksmith, when he cannot get leave to idle at some such piece of work as this. Quintin Matsys is the child's name, but that, of course, a citizen of thy master's state will hardly care to hear."

"Will he not indeed!" cried Herr Burgher, in double excitement when he heard. "Quintin Matsys, a boy of fourteen, made my rails? Then let news be sent to Quintin Matsys to appear here without delay, and I will find a master for him who shall let him 'idle' to his heart's content, for one three months at least! We will have one more famous artisan in Antwerp before many years!"

The second message set off at the same deliberate rate as the first, but when the twenty miles were passed at last, it dropped like a bombshell of excitement into the little mud-walled cottage near the forge.