In studying how to make home beautiful, we must not forget that, first of all, there must be a home; and that in a true home, the household, and not the house, is of primary importance. We have all seen careful housekeepers whose first and last thought was to keep their domains with absolute neatness, and whose domestic law was of Median and Persian inflexibility. Overshoes must be left here; slippers must be put on there; the front stair-carpet must only be trodden by the visitor’s foot; the front door-latch must never be lifted by the children’s hand; curtains must be drawn close lest carpets fade; and autumn fires remain unlighted lest ashes fly. These were housekeepers, not home makers. The virtue of carefulness is a housewife’s glory; but when carried to an excess, it becomes a woman’s shame, leading her to imagine that meat is more than life, raiment than body, and house than man. Of the virtuous woman we read first: “She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness;” then that “she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness;” after which it follows naturally that “her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also, and he praiseth her;” but when the devil of neatness enters into a woman he defies family comfort, and banishes the angel of peace from the home. And yet comfort, important though its place may be in the home economy, is not to be the first aim. A wise critic says: “Every house should have in it that which tells of strength, and seems to favor self-sacrifice, simplicity, self-control. Nothing is finer in a house than a kind of subtle ubiquitous spirit, which asserts the superiority of the household, and tells you that they fear neither hunger nor cold, neither toil nor danger, and do not bow down, night and morning to the vulgar divinity, Comfort.” Not the house we live in, but the life we live in it is that on which the real beauty of home depends. In the House Beautiful, not Mr. Cook’s, nor Mrs. Allen’s, but in that incomparable House Beautiful which Bunyan has described for us, even there the boy Matthew fell sick from tampering with the fruit of Beelzebub’s garden. Compared with this soundness of inner life in the house, these questions of outer adornment, of taste, or expediency, or expense, are but unimportant matters, since no home can be truly beautiful that is tarnished by an unworthy life within its walls.