In doors, and out doors, too, the new life was full of happiness. The gentle felicity of the literary recluse breathes through the description he gave of the place and time and habits of existence in the Manse, which he wrote out for his readers in the pleasantest of his autobiographical papers; and as for details to supply a more complete picture,--are they not written at large in the family letters? His wife worshiped him, and named him all the names of classic mythology and history,--Endymion, Epaminondas, Apollo,--glorying in his physical kinghood, as she saw it, when he glided skating in the rose-colored air of twilight, and also in the divine qualities of his spirit in doors, where he, on occasion--and the occasion grew more and more frequent--would wash the dishes, do the chores, cook the meals even, relieving her of every care of this kind in servant matters. He read to her in the evenings Macaulay, all of Shakspere, the Sermon on the Mount for Sunday, and generally the old books over, Thomson's "Castle," Spenser's faeryland, and the rest. She rejoiced in him and all that was his; and she painted and modeled a good deal and worked out her artistic instincts very happily for herself, and much to her husband's sympathetic pleasure. Una, the first child, was born March 3, 1844, and with this new revelation life went on in deeper and sweeter ways of feeling, thought, and service. The home is easily to be seen now, though it was then so private a place,--a home essentially not of an uncommon New England type, where refined qualities and noble behavior flourished close to the soil of homely duties and the daily happiness of natural lives under whatever hardships; a home of friendly ties, of high thoughts within, and of poverty bravely borne.