Where love our hours employs;
No noisy neighbor enters here
No intermeddling stranger near,
To spoil our heartfelt joys.
—N. Cotton.
The room which above all others should be furnished with the most loving thought and lavish expense is the household parlor, or family sitting room. Here the father reads his evening paper, the mother busies herself with her ready needle, the children “with books, or work or healthful play.” This should be to eye and body preëminently a restful room, commodious, cheerful. If the reception room for visitors needs the cheer of firelight, how much more the living room of the household.
Whittier’s description of the homely comfort of an old New England farm house remains unexcelled in the literature of house furnishing:
“Shut in from all the world without
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar