Two men marry, and the two marriages are set side by side for twenty years: one wife makes a home, the other makes a point, and the husbands go the way the houses take them. Arthur left school at thirteen, half-blind and apprenticed to a watchmaker, and became one of the most widely read Americans of his century; the moral is stated on the tin, and the domestic observation underneath it is better than the frame deserves. Fifty-five plates of home and its absence, from Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer, follow the two households through the century.