University of Virginia Library

11. XI.
OUR HOUSE.

OUR gallant Bob Stephens, into whose life-boat
our Marianne has been received, has lately
taken the mania of house-building into his head. Bob
is somewhat fastidious, difficult to please, fond of
domesticities and individualities; and such a man
never can fit himself into a house built by another,
and accordingly house-building has always been his
favorite mental recreation. During all his courtship
as much time was taken up in planning a future house
as if he had money to build one; and all Marianne's
patterns, and the backs of half their letters, were
scrawled with ground-plans and elevations. But latterly
this chronic disposition has been quickened into
an acute form by the falling-in of some few thousands
to their domestic treasury, — left as the sole residuum
of a painstaking old aunt, who took it into
her head to make a will in Bob's favor, leaving, among
other good things, a nice little bit of land in a rural
district half an hour's railroad-ride from Boston.

So now ground-plans thicken, and my wife is being

consulted morning, noon, and night; and I never
come into the room without finding their heads close
together over a paper, and hearing Bob expatiate on
his favorite idea of a library. He appears to have
got so far as this, that the ceiling is to be of carved
oak, with ribs running to a boss over head, and
finished mediævally with ultramarine blue and gilding,
— and then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns
of book-shelves which require only experienced carvers,
and the wherewithal to pay them, to be the
divinest things in the world.

Marianne is exercised about china-closets and pantries,
and about a bedroom on the ground-floor, —
for, like all other women of our days, she expects not
to have strength enough to run up-stairs oftener than
once or twice a week; and my wife, who is a native
genius in this line, and has planned in her time dozens
of houses for acquaintances, wherein they are at
this moment living happily, goes over every day with
her pencil and ruler the work of rearranging the plans,
according as the ideas of the young couple veer and
vary.

One day Bob is importuned to give two feet off
from his library for a closet in the bedroom, — but
resists like a Trojan. The next morning, being mollified
by private domestic supplications, Bob yields,
and my wife rubs out the lines of yesterday, two feet

come off the library, and a closet is constructed. But
now the parlor proves too narrow, — the parlor-wall
must be moved two feet into the hall. Bob declares
this will spoil the symmetry of the latter; and if there
is anything he wants, it is a wide, generous, ample hall
to step into when you open the front-door.

“Well, then,” says Marianne, “let 's put two feet
more into the width of the house.”

“Can 't on account of the expense, you see,” says
Bob. “You see every additional foot of outside wall
necessitates so many more bricks, so much more flooring,
so much more roofing, etc.”

And my wife, with thoughtful brow, looks over the
plans, and considers how two feet more are to be got
into the parlor without moving any of the walls.

“I say,” says Bob, bending over her shoulder,
“here, take your two feet in the parlor, and put two
more feet on to the other side of the hall-stairs”;
and he dashes heavily with his pencil.

“O, Bob!” exclaims Marianne, “there are the
kitchen-pantries! you ruin them, — and no place for
the cellar-stairs!”

“Hang the pantries and cellar-stairs!” says Bob.
“Mother must find a place for them somewhere else.
I say the house must be roomy and cheerful, and pantries
and those things may take care of themselves;
they can be put somewhere well enough. No fear

but you will find a place for them somewhere. What
do you women always want such a great enormous
kitchen for?”

“It is not any larger than is necessary,” said my
wife, thoughtfully; “nothing is gained by taking off
from it.”

“What if you should put it all down into a basement,”
suggests Bob, “and so get it all out of sight
together?”

“Never if it can be helped,” said my wife. “Basement-kitchens
are necessary evils, only to be tolerated
in cities where land is too dear to afford any other.”

So goes the discussion till the trio agree to sleep
over it. The next morning an inspiration visits my
wife's pillow. She is up and seizes plans and paper,
and before six o'clock has enlarged the parlor very
cleverly, by throwing out a bow-window. So waxes
and wanes the prospective house, innocently battered
down and rebuilt with India-rubber and black-lead.
Doors are cut out to-night, and walled up to-morrow;
windows knocked out here and put in there, as some observer
suggests possibilities of too much or too little
draught. Now all seems finished, when, lo, a discovery!
There is no fireplace nor stove-flue in my lady's bedroom,
and can be none without moving the bathing-room.
Pencil and India-rubber are busy again, and for
a while the whole house seems to threaten to fall to

pieces with the confusion of the moving; the bath-room
wanders like a ghost, now invading a closet, now threatening
the tranquillity of the parlor, till at last it is
laid by some unheard-of calculations of my wife's,
and sinks to rest in a place so much better that every
body wonders it never was thought of before.

“Papa,” said Jenny, “it appears to me people
don't exactly know what they want when they build;
why don't you write a paper on house-building?”

“I have thought of it,” said I, with the air of a man
called to settle some great reform. “It must be entirely
because Christopher has not written that our
young people and mamma are tangling themselves
daily in webs which are untangled the next day.”

“You see,” said Jenny, “they have only just so
much money, and they want everything they can think
of under the sun. There 's Bob been studying architectural
antiquities, and nobody knows what, and
sketching all sorts of curly-whorlies; and Marianne has
her notions about a parlor and boudoir and china-closets
and bedroom-closets; and Bob wants a baronial
hall; and mamma stands out for linen-closets and
bathing-rooms and all that; and so among them all it
will just end in getting them head over ears in debt.”

The thing struck me as not improbable.

“I don't know, Jenny, whether my writing an article
is going to prevent all this; but as my time in the

`Atlantic' is coming round, I may as well write on
what I am obliged to think of, and so I will give a
paper on the subject to enliven our next evening's
session.”

So that evening, when Bob and Marianne had
dropped in as usual, and while the customary work
of drawing and rubbing-out was going on at Mrs.
Crowfield's sofa, I produced my paper and read as
follows: —

OUR HOUSE.

There is a place called “Our House,” which everybody
knows of. The sailor talks of it in his dreams
at sea. The wounded soldier, turning in his uneasy
hospital-bed, brightens at the word; it is like the
dropping of cool water in the desert, like the touch
of cool fingers on a burning brow. “Our house,” he
says feebly, and the light comes back into his dim
eyes, — for all homely charities, all fond thoughts, all
purities, all that man loves on earth or hopes for in
heaven, rise with the word.

“Our house” may be in any style of architecture,
low or high. It may be the brown old farm-house,
with its tall well-sweep; or the one-story gambrel-roofed
cottage; or the large, square, white house, with green
blinds, under the wind-swung elms of a century; or
it may be the log-cabin of the wilderness, with its one

room, — still there is a spell in the memory of it beyond
all conjurations. Its stone and brick and mortar
are like no other; its very clapboards and shingles
are dear to us, powerful to bring back the memories
of early days, and all that is sacred in home-love.

“Papa is getting quite sentimental,” whispered Jenny,
loud enough for me to hear. I shook my head at
her impressively, and went on undaunted.

There is no one fact of our human existence that
has a stronger influence upon us than the house wedwell
in, — especially that in which our earlier and
more impressible years are spent. The building and
arrangement of a house influence the health, the comfort,
the morals, the religion. There have been houses
built so devoid of all consideration for the occupants,
so rambling and hap-hazard in the disposal of rooms,
so sunless and cheerless and wholly without snugness
or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a
joyous, generous, rational, religious family-life in them.

There are, we shame to say, in our cities things
called houses, built and rented by people who walk
erect and have the general air and manner of civilized
and Christianized men, which are so inhuman in their
building that they can only be called snares and traps
for souls, — places where children cannot well escape

growing up filthy and impure, — places where to form
a home is impossible, and to live a decent, Christian
life would require miraculous strength.

A celebrated British philanthropist, who had devoted
much study to the dwellings of the poor, gave
it as his opinion that temperance-societies were a
hopeless undertaking in London, unless these dwellings
underwent a transformation. They were so
squalid, so dark, so comfortless, so constantly pressing
upon the senses foulness, pain, and inconvenience,
that it was only by being drugged with gin and
opium that their miserable inhabitants could find heart
to drag on life from day to day. He had himself tried
the experiment of reforming a drunkard by taking him
from one of these loathsome dens, and enabling him
to rent a tenement in a block of model lodging-houses
which had been built under his supervision. The
young man had been a designer of figures for prints;
he was of a delicate frame, and a nervous, susceptible
temperament. Shut in one miserable room with his
wife and little children, without the possibility of pure
air, with only filthy, fetid water to drink, with the
noise of other miserable families resounding through
the thin partitions, what possibility was there of doing
anything except by the help of stimulants, which for
a brief hour lifted him above the perception of these
miseries? Changed at once to a neat flat, where, for

the same rent as his former den, he had three good
rooms, with water for drinking, house-service, and
bathing freely supplied, and the blessed sunshine and
air coming in through windows well arranged for ventilation,
he became in a few weeks a new man. In
the charms of the little spot which he could call home,
its quiet, its order, his former talent came back to him,
and he found strength, in pure air and pure water and
those purer thoughts of which they are the emblems,
to abandon burning and stupefying stimulants.

The influence of dwelling-houses for good or for
evil — their influence on the brain, the nerves, and,
through these, on the heart and life — is one of those
things that cannot be enough pondered by those who
build houses to sell or rent.

Something more generous ought to inspire a man
than merely the percentage which he can get for his
money. He who would build houses should think
a little on the subject. He should reflect what houses
are for, — what they may be made to do for human
beings. The great majority of houses in cities are
not built by the indwellers themselves, — they are
built for them by those who invest their money in
this way, with little other thought than the percentage
which the investment will return.

For persons of ample fortune there are, indeed,
palatial residences, with all that wealth can do to

render life delightful. But in that class of houses
which must be the lot of the large majority, those
which must be chosen by young men in the beginning
of life, when means are comparatively restricted,
there is yet wide room for thought and the judicious
application of money.

In looking over houses to be rented by persons of
moderate means, one cannot help longing to build, —
one sees so many ways in which the same sum which
built an inconvenient and unpleasant house might
have been made to build a delightful one.

“That 's so!” said Bob, with emphasis. “Don't
you remember, Marianne, how many dismal, commonplace,
shabby houses we trailed through?”

“Yes,” said Marianne. “You remember those
houses with such little squeezed rooms and that flourishing
staircase, with the colored-glass china-closet window,
and no butler's sink?”

“Yes,” said Bob; “and those astonishing, abominable
stone abortions that adorned the door-steps.
People do lay out a deal of money to make houses
look ugly, it must be confessed.”

“One would willingly,” said Marianne, “dispense
with frightful stone ornaments in front, and with heavy
mouldings inside, which are of no possible use or
beauty, and with showy plaster cornices and centre

pieces in the parlor-ceilings, and even with marble
mantels, for the luxury of hot and cold water in each
chamber, and a couple of comfortable bath-rooms.
Then, the disposition of windows and doors is so
wholly without regard to convenience! How often
we find rooms, meant for bedrooms, where really there
is no good place for either bed or dressing-table!”

Here my wife looked up, having just finished redrawing
the plans to the latest alteration.

“One of the greatest reforms that could be, in these
reforming days,” she observed, “would be to have
women architects. The mischief with houses built
to rent is that they are all mere male contrivances.
No woman would ever plan chambers where there
is no earthly place to set a bed except against a window
or door, or waste the room in entries that might
be made into closets. I don't see, for my part, apropos
to the modern movement for opening new professions
to the female sex, why there should not be
well-educated female architects. The planning and
arrangement of houses, and the laying-out of grounds,
are a fair subject of womanly knowledge and taste.
It is the teaching of Nature. What would anybody
think of a bluebird's nest that had been built entirely
by Mr. Blue, without the help of his wife?”

“My dear,” said I, “you must positively send a
paper on this subject to the next Woman's-Rights
Convention.”

“I am of Sojourner Truth's opinion,” said my wife,
— “that the best way to prove the propriety of one's
doing anything is to go and do it. A woman who
should have energy to go through the preparatory
studies and set to work in this field would, I am sure,
soon find employment.”

“If she did as well as you would do, my dear,” said
I. “There are plenty of young women in our Boston
high-schools who are going through higher fields of
mathematics than are required by the architect, and
the schools for design show the flexibility and fertility
of the female pencil. The thing appears to me
altogether more feasible than many other openings
which have been suggested to woman.”

“Well,” said Jenny, “is n't papa ever to go on
with his paper?”

I continued: —

What ought “our house” to be? Could any other
question be asked admitting in its details of such
varied answers, — answers various as the means, the
character, and situation of different individuals? But
there are great wants pertaining to every human being,
into which all lesser ones run. There are things in a
house that every one, high or low, rich or poor, ought,
according to his means, to seek. I think I shall class
them according to the elemental division of the old

philosophers, — Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. These
form the groundwork of this need-be, — the sine-quanons
of a house.

“Fire, air, earth, and water! I don't understand,”
said Jenny.

“Wait a little till you do, then,” said I. “I will
try to make my meaning plain.”

The first object of a house is shelter from the elements.
This object is effected by a tent or wigwam
which keeps off rain and wind. The first disadvantage
of this shelter is, that the vital air which you take
into your lungs, and on the purity of which depends
the purity of blood and brain and nerve, is vitiated.
In the wigwam or tent you are constantly taking in
poison, more or less active, with every inspiration.
Napoleon had his army sleep without tents. He
stated, that from experience, he found it more healthy;
and wonderful have been the instances of delicate persons
gaining constantly in vigor from being obliged,
in the midst of hardships, to sleep constantly in the
open air. Now the first problem in house-building is
to combine the advantage of shelter with the fresh
elasticity of out-door air. I am not going to give here
a treatise on ventilation, but merely to say, in general
terms, that the first object of a house-builder or contriver

should be to make a healthy house; and the first
requisite of a healthy house is a pure, sweet, elastic air.

I am in favor, therefore, of those plans of house-building
which have wide central spaces, whether
halls or courts, into which all the rooms open, and
which necessarily preserve a body of fresh air for the
use of them all. In hot climates this is the object
of the central court which cuts into the body of the
house, with its fountain and flowers, and its galleries,
into which the various apartments open. When people
are restricted for space, and cannot afford to give
up wide central portions of the house for the mere
purposes of passage, this central hall can be made
a pleasant sitting-room. With tables, chairs, bookcases,
and sofas comfortably disposed, this ample
central room above and below is, in many respects,
the most agreeable lounging-room of the house; while
the parlors below and the chambers above, opening
upon it, form agreeable withdrawing-rooms for purposes
of greater privacy.

It is customary with many persons to sleep with
bedroom windows open, — a very imperfect and often
dangerous mode of procuring that supply of fresh air
which a sleeping-room requires. In a house constructed
in the manner indicated, windows might be
freely left open in these central halls, producing there
a constant movement of air, and the doors of the bedrooms

placed ajar, when a very slight opening in the
windows would create a free circulation through the
apartments.

In the planning of a house, thought should be had
as to the general disposition of the windows, and the
quarters from which favoring breezes may be expected
should be carefully considered. Windows should be
so arranged that draughts of air can be thrown quite
through and across the house. How often have we
seen pale mothers and drooping babes fanning and
panting during some of our hot days on the sunny
side of a house, while the breeze that should have
cooled them beat in vain against a dead wall! One
longs sometimes to knock holes through partitions,
and let in the air of heaven.

No other gift of God, so precious, so inspiring, is
treated with such utter irreverence and contempt in
the calculations of us mortals as this same air of
heaven. A sermon on oxygen, if one had a preacher
who understood the subject, might do more to repress
sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when
and how and why sin came. A minister gets up in
a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost
makes the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness
of the church, — the church the while, drugged
by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and sleepier,
though they feel dreadfully wicked for being so.

Little Jim, who, fresh from his afternoon's ramble
in the fields, last evening said his prayers dutifully,
and lay down to sleep in a most Christian frame, this
morning sits up in bed with his hair bristling with
crossness, strikes at his nurse, and declares he won't
say his prayers, — that he don't want to be good.
The simple difference is, that the child, having slept
in a close box of a room, his brain all night fed by
poison, is in a mild state of moral insanity. Delicate
women remark that it takes them till eleven or
twelve o'clock to get up their strength in the morning.
Query, — Do they sleep with closed windows and
doors, and with heavy bed-curtains?

The houses built by our ancestors were better ventilated
in certain respects than modern ones, with all
their improvements. The great central chimney, with
its open fireplaces in the different rooms, created a
constant current which carried off foul and vitiated
air. In these days, how common is it to provide
rooms with only a flue for a stove! This flue is kept
shut in summer, and in winter opened only to admit
a close stove, which burns away the vital portion of
the air quite as fast as the occupants breathe it away.
The sealing-up of fireplaces and introduction of air-tight
stoves may, doubtless, be a saving of fuel: it
saves, too, more than that; in thousands and thousands
of cases it has saved people from all further

human wants, and put an end forever to any needs
short of the six feet of narrow earth which are man's
only inalienable property. In other words, since the
invention of air-tight stoves, thousands have died of
slow poison. It is a terrible thing to reflect upon,
that our northern winters last from November to
May, six long months, in which many families confine
themselves to one room, of which every window-crack
has been carefully calked to make it air-tight, where
an air-tight stove keeps the atmosphere at a temperature
between eighty and ninety, and the inmates sitting
there with all their winter clothes on become
enervated both by the heat and by the poisoned air,
for which there is no escape but the occasional opening
of a door.

It is no wonder that the first result of all this is
such a delicacy of skin and lungs that about half the
inmates are obliged to give up going into the open
air during the six cold months, because they invariably
catch cold, if they do so. It is no wonder that
the cold caught about the first of December has by
the first of March become a fixed consumption, and
that the opening of the spring, which ought to bring
life and health, in so many cases brings death.

We hear of the lean condition in which the poor
bears emerge from their six-months' wintering, during
which they subsist on the fat which they have acquired

the previous summer. Even so in our long winters,
multitudes of delicate people subsist on the daily
waning strength which they acquired in the season
when windows and doors were open, and fresh air
was a constant luxury. No wonder we hear of spring
fever and spring biliousness, and have thousands of
nostrums for clearing the blood in the spring. All
these things are the pantings and palpitations of a
system run down under slow poison, unable to get
a step farther. Better, far better, the old houses of
the olden time, with their great roaring fires, and their
bedrooms where the snow came in and the wintry
winds whistled. Then, to be sure, you froze your
back while you burned your face, your water froze
nightly in your pitcher, your breath congealed in ice-wreaths
on the blankets, and you could write your
name on the pretty snow-wreath that had sifted in
through the window-cracks. But you woke full of life
and vigor, — you looked out into whirling snow-storms
without a shiver, and thought nothing of plunging
through drifts as high as your head on your daily way
to school. You jingled in sleighs, you snowballed,
you lived in snow like a snow-bird, and your blood
coursed and tingled, in full tide of good, merry, real
life, through your veins, — none of the slow-creeping,
black blood which clogs the brain and lies like a
weight on the vital wheels!

“Mercy upon us, papa!” said Jenny, “I hope we
need not go back to such houses!”

“No, my dear,” I replied. “I only said that such
houses were better than those which are all winter
closed by double windows and burnt-out air-tight
stoves.”

The perfect house is one in which there is a constant
escape of every foul and vitiated particle of air
through one opening, while a constant supply of fresh
out-door air is admitted by another. In winter, this
out-door air must pass through some process by which
it is brought up to a temperate warmth.

Take a single room, and suppose on one side a current
of out-door air which has been warmed by passing
through the air-chamber of a modern furnace. Its
temperature need not be above sixty-five, — it answers
breathing purposes better at that. On the other side
of the room let there be an open wood- or coal-fire.
One cannot conceive the purposes of warmth and
ventilation more perfectly combined.

Suppose a house with a great central hall, into
which a current of fresh, temperately warmed air is
continually pouring. Each chamber opening upon
this hall has a chimney up whose flue the rarefied air
is constantly passing, drawing up with it all the foul
and poisonous gases. That house is well ventilated,

and in a way that need bring no dangerous draughts
upon the most delicate invalid. For the better securing
of privacy in sleeping-rooms, we have seen two
doors employed, one of which is made with slats, like
a window-blind, so that air is freely transmitted without
exposing the interior.

When we speak of fresh air, we insist on the full
rigor of the term. It must not be the air of a cellar,
heavily laden with the poisonous nitrogen of turnips
and cabbages, but good, fresh, out-door air from a cold-air
pipe, so placed as not to get the lower stratum
near the ground, where heavy damps and exhalations
collect, but high up, in just the clearest and most elastic
region.

The conclusion of the whole matter is, that as all of
man's and woman's peace and comfort, all their love,
all their amiability, all their religion, have got to come
to them, while they live in this world, through the
medium of the brain, — and as black, uncleansed
blood acts on the brain as a poison, and as no other
than black, uncleansed blood can be got by the lungs
out of impure air, — the first object of the man who
builds a house is to secure a pure and healthy atmosphere
therein.

Therefore, in allotting expenses, set this down as a
must-be: “Our house must have fresh air, — everywhere,
at all times, winter and summer.” Whether

we have stone facings or no, — whether our parlor has
cornices or marble mantles or no, — whether our
doors are machine-made or hand-made. All our fixtures
shall be of the plainest and simplest, but we
will have fresh air. We will open our door with a
latch and string, if we cannot afford lock and knob
and fresh air too, — but in our house we will live
cleanly and Christianly. We will no more breathe
the foul air rejected from a neighbor's lungs than
we will use a neighbor's tooth-brush and hair-brush.
Such is the first essential of “our house,” — the
first great element of human health and happiness,
— Air.

“I say, Marianne,” said Bob, “have we got fireplaces
in our chambers?”

“Mamma took care of that,” said Marianne.

“You may be quite sure,” said I, “if your mother
has had a hand in planning your house, that the ventilation
is cared for.”

It must be confessed that Bob's principal idea in a
house had been a Gothic library, and his mind had
labored more on the possibility of adapting some favorite
bits from the baronial antiquities to modern
needs than on anything so terrestrial as air. Therefore
he awoke as from a dream, and taking two or
three monstrous inhalations, he seized the plans and

began looking over them with new energy. Meanwhile
I went on with my prelection.

The second great vital element for which provision
must be made in “our house” is Fire. By which I
do not mean merely artificial fire, but fire in all its
extent and branches, — the heavenly fire which God
sends us daily on the bright wings of sunbeams, as
well as the mimic fires by which we warm our dwellings,
cook our food, and light our nightly darkness.

To begin, then, with heavenly fire or sunshine. If
God's gift of vital air is neglected and undervalued,
His gift of sunshine appears to be hated. There are
many houses where not a cent has been expended on
ventilation, but where hundreds of dollars have been
freely lavished to keep out the sunshine. The chamber,
truly, is tight as a box, — it has no fireplace, not
even a ventilator opening into the stove-flue; but, oh,
joy and gladness! it has outside blinds and inside
folding-shutters, so that in the brightest of days we
may create there a darkness that may be felt. To
observe the generality of New-England houses, a
spectator might imagine they were planned for the
torrid zone, where the great object is to keep out a
furnace-draught of burning air.

But let us look over the months of our calendar.
In which of them do we not need fires on our hearths?

We will venture to say that from October to June all
families, whether they actually have it or not, would
be the more comfortable for a morning and evening
fire. For eight months in the year the weather varies
on the scale of cool, cold, colder, and freezing; and
for all the four other months what is the number of
days that really require the torrid-zone system of
shutting up houses? We all know that extreme heat
is the exception, and not the rule.

Yet let anybody travel, as I did last year, through
the valley of the Connecticut, and observe the houses.
All clean and white and neat and well-to-do, with
their turfy yards and their breezy great elms, — but
all shut up from basement to attic, as if the inmates
had all sold out and gone to China. Not a window-blind
open above or below. Is the house inhabited?
No, — yes, — there is a faint stream of blue smoke
from the kitchen-chimney, and half a window-blind
open in some distant back-part of the house. They
are living there in the dim shadows, bleaching like
potato-sprouts in the cellar.

“I can tell you why they do it, papa,” said Jenny,
— “It's the flies, and flies are certainly worthy to be
one of the plagues of Egypt. I can 't myself blame
people that shut up their rooms and darken their
houses in fly-time, — do you, mamma?”

“Not in extreme cases; though I think there is but
a short season when this is necessary; yet the habit
of shutting up lasts the year round, and gives to New-England
villages that dead, silent, cold, uninhabited
look which is so peculiar.

“The one fact that a traveller would gather in passing
through our villages would be this,” said I, “that
the people live in their houses and in the dark.
Rarely do you see doors and windows open, people
sitting at them, chairs in the yard, and signs that the
inhabitants are living out-of-doors.”

“Well,” said Jenny, “I have told you why, for I
have been at Uncle Peter's in summer, and aunt does
her spring-cleaning in May, and then she shuts all the
blinds and drops all the curtains, and the house stays
clean till October. That's the whole of it. If she
had all her windows open, there would be paint and
windows to be cleaned every week; and who is to
do it? For my part, I can 't much blame her.”

“Well,” said I, “I have my doubts about the sovereign
efficacy of living in the dark, even if the great
object of existence were to be rid of flies. I remember,
during this same journey, stopping for a day or
two at a country boarding-house which was dark as
Egypt from cellar to garret. The long, dim, gloomy
dining-room was first closed by outside blinds, and
then by impenetrable paper curtains, notwithstanding

which it swarmed and buzzed like a beehive. You
found where the cake-plate was by the buzz which your
hand made, if you chanced to reach in that direction.
It was disagreeable, because in the darkness flies
could not always be distinguished from huckleberries;
and I could n't help wishing, that, since we must have
the flies, we might at last have the light and air to
console us under them. People darken their rooms
and shut up every avenue of out-door enjoyment, and
sit and think of nothing but flies; in fact, flies are all
they have left. No wonder they become morbid on
the subject.”

“Well, now, papa talks just like a man, doesn't
he?” said Jenny. “He has n't the responsibility of
keeping things clean. I wonder what he would do,
if he were a housekeeper.”

“Do? I will tell you. I would do the best I
could. I would shut my eyes on fly-specks, and
open them on the beauties of Nature. I would let
the cheerful sun in all day long, in all but the few
summer days when coolness is the one thing needful:
those days may be soon numbered every year. I
would make a calculation in the spring how much it
would cost to hire a woman to keep my windows
and paint clean, and I would do with one less gown
and have her; and when I had spent all I could afford
on cleaning windows and paint, I would harden my

heart and turn off my eyes, and enjoy my sunshine,
and my fresh air, my breezes, and all that can be seen
through the picture-windows of an open, airy house,
and snap my fingers at the flies. There you have it.”

“Papa's hobby is sunshine,” said Marianne.

“Why shouldn't it be? Was God mistaken, when
He made the sun? Did He make him for us to hold
a life's battle with? Is that vital power which reddens
the cheek of the peach and pours sweetness through
the fruits and flowers of no use to us? Look at
plants that grow without sun, — wan, pale, long-visaged,
holding feeble, imploring hands of supplication
towards the light. Can human beings afford to throw
away a vitalizing force so pungent, so exhilarating?
You remember the experiment of a prison, where
one row of cells had daily sunshine, and the others
none. With the same regimen, the same cleanliness,
the same care, the inmates of the sunless cells were
visited with sickness and death in double measure.
Our whole population in New England are groaning
and suffering under afflictions, the result of a depressed
vitality, — neuralgia, with a new ache for every day
of the year, rheumatism, consumption, general debility;
for all these a thousand nostrums are daily
advertised, and money enough is spent on them to
equip an army, while we are fighting against, wasting,
and throwing away with both hands that blessed

influence which comes nearest to pure vitality of anything
God has given.

“Who is it that the Bible describes as a sun, arising
with healing in his wings? Surely, that sunshine
which is the chosen type and image of His love must
be healing through all the recesses of our daily life,
drying damp and mould, defending from moth and
rust, sweetening ill smells, clearing from the nerves
the vapors of melancholy, making life cheery. If I
did not know Him, I should certainly adore and worship
the sun, the most blessed and beautiful image of
Him among things visible! In the land of Egypt, in
the day of God's wrath, there was darkness, but in the
land of Goshen there was light. I am a Goshenite,
and mean to walk in the light, and forswear the works
of darkness. But to proceed with our reading.”

“Our house” shall be set on a southeast line, so
that there shall not be a sunless room in it, and windows
shall be so arranged that it can be traversed and
transpierced through and through with those bright
shafts of light which come straight from God.

“Our house” shall not be blockaded with a dank,
dripping mass of shrubbery set plumb against the windows,
keeping out light and air. There shall be room
all round it for breezes to sweep, and sunshine to
sweeten and dry and vivify; and I would warn all

good souls who begin life by setting out two little evergreen-trees
within a foot of each of their front-windows,
that these trees will grow and increase till their frontrooms
will be brooded over by a sombre, stifling
shadow fit only for ravens to croak in.

One would think, by the way some people hasten to
convert a very narrow front-yard into a dismal jungle,
that the only danger of our New England climate was
sunstroke. Ah, in those drizzling months which form
at least one half of our life here, what sullen, censorious,
uncomfortable, unhealthy thoughts are bred of
living in dark, chilly rooms, behind such dripping
thickets? Our neighbors' faults assume a deeper hue,
—life seems a dismal thing, — our very religion grows
mouldy.

My idea of a house is, that, as far as is consistent
with shelter and reasonable privacy, it should give you
on first entering an open, breezy, out-door freshness of
sensation. Every window should be a picture; sun
and trees and clouds and green grass should seem
never to be far from us. “Our house” may shade but
not darken us. “Our house” shall have bow-windows,
many, sunny, and airy, — not for the purpose of being
cleaned and shut up, but to be open and enjoyed.
There shall be long verandahs above and below, where
invalids may walk dry-shod, and enjoy open-air recreation
in wettest weather. In short, I will try to have

“our house” combine as far as possible the sunny, joyous,
fresh life of a gypsy in the fields and woods with
the quiet and neatness and comfort and shelter of a
roof, rooms, floors, and carpets.

After heavenly fire, I have a word to say of earthly,
artificial fires. Furnaces, whether of hot water, steam,
or hot air, are all healthy and admirable provisions for
warming our houses during the eight or nine months
of our year that we must have artificial heat, if only,
as I have said, fireplaces keep up a current of ventilation.

The kitchen-range with its water-back I humbly salute.
It is a great throbbing heart, and sends its warm
tides of cleansing, comforting fluid all through the
house. One could wish that this friendly dragon could
be in some way moderated in his appetite for coal, —
he does consume without mercy, it must be confessed,
— but then great is the work he has to do. At any
hour of day or night, in the most distant part of your
house, you have but to turn a stop-cock and your red
dragon sends you hot water for your needs; your
washing-day becomes a mere play-day; your pantry
has its ever-ready supply; and then, by a little judicious
care in arranging apartments and economizing
heat, a range may make two or three chambers comfortable
in winter weather. A range with a water-back
is among the must-bes in “our house.”

Then, as to the evening light, — I know nothing as
yet better than gas, where it can be had. I would
certainly not have a house without it. The great objection
to it is the danger of its escape through imperfect
fixtures. But it must not do this; a fluid that kills
a tree or a plant with one breath must certainly be a
dangerous ingredient in the atmosphere, and if admitted
into houses, must be introduced with every safeguard.

There are families living in the country who make
their own gas by a very simple process. This is worth
an inquiry from those who build. There are also contrivances
now advertised, with good testimonials, of
domestic machines for generating gas, said to be
perfectly safe, simple to be managed, and producing a
light superior to that of the city gas-works. This
also is worth an inquiry when “our house” is to be
in the country.

And now I come to the next great vital element for
which “our house” must provide, — Water. “Water,
water, everywhere,” — it must be plentiful, it must be
easy to get at, it must be pure. Our ancestors had
some excellent ideas in home-living and house-building.
Their houses were, generally speaking, very sensibly
contrived, — roomy, airy, and comfortable; but
in their water-arrangements they had little mercy on

womankind. The well was out in the yard; and in
winter one must flounder through snow and bring up
the ice-bound bucket, before one could fill the tea-kettle
for breakfast. For a sovereign princess of the
republic this was hardly respectful or respectable.
Wells have come somewhat nearer in modern times;
but the idea of a constant supply of fresh water by the
simple turning of a stop-cock has not yet visited the
great body of our houses. Were we free to build
“our house” just as we wish it, there should be a
bath-room to every two or three inmates, and the hot
and cold water should circulate to every chamber.

Among our must-bes, we would lay by a generous
sum for plumbing. Let us have our bath-rooms, and
our arrangements for cleanliness and health in kitchen
and pantry; and afterwards let the quality of our
lumber and the style of our finishings be according to
the sum we have left. The power to command a
warm bath in a house at any hour of day or night is
better in bringing up a family of children than any
amount of ready medicine. In three-quarters of
childish ailments the warm bath is an almost immediate
remedy. Bad colds, incipient fevers, rheumatisms,
convulsions, neuralgias imnumerable, are
washed off in their first beginnings, and run down the
lead pipes into oblivion. Have, then, O friend, all
the water in your house that you can afford, and enlarge

your ideas of the worth of it, that you may afford
a great deal. A bathing-room is nothing to you that
requires an hour of lifting and fire-making to prepare
it for use. The apparatus is too cumbrous, — you do
not turn to it. But when your chamber opens upon
a neat, quiet little nook, and you have only to turn
your stop-cocks and all is ready, your remedy is at
hand, you use it constantly. You are waked in the
night by a scream, and find little Tom sitting up, wild
with burning fever. In three minutes he is in the
bath, quieted and comfortable; you get him back,
cooled and tranquil, to his little crib, and in the morning
he wakes as if nothing had happened.

Why should not so invaluable and simple a remedy
for disease, such a preservative of health, such a comfort,
such a stimulus, be considered as much a matterter-of-course
in a house as a kitchen-chimney? At
least there should be one bath-room always in order,
so arranged that all the family can have access to it,
if one cannot afford the luxury of many.

A house in which water is universally and skilfully
distributed is so much easier to take care of as almost
to verify the saying of a friend, that his house was so
contrived that it did its own work: one had better do
without carpets on the floors, without stuffed sofas and
rocking-chairs, and secure this.

“Well, papa,” said Marianne, “you have made out
all your four elements in your house, except one. I
can't imagine what you want of earth.”

“I thought,” said Jenny, “that the less of our common
mother we had in our houses, the better housekeepers
we were.”

“My dears,” said I, “we philosophers must give
an occasional dip into the mystical, and say something
apparently absurd for the purpose of explaining that
we mean nothing in particular by it. It gives common
people an idea of our sagacity, to find how clear
we come out of our apparent contradictions and absurdities.
Listen.”

For the fourth requisite of “our house,” Earth, let
me point you to your mother's plant-window, and beg
you to remember the fact that through our long, dreary
winters we are never a month without flowers, and the
vivid interest which always attaches to growing things.
The perfect house, as I conceive it, is to combine as
many of the advantages of living out of doors as may
be consistent with warmth and shelter, and one of
these is the sympathy with green and growing things.
Plants are nearer in their relations to human health
and vigor than is often imagined. The cheerfulness
that well-kept plants impart to a room comes not
merely from gratification of the eye, — there is a

healthful exhalation from them, they are a corrective
of the impurities of the atmosphere. Plants, too, are
valuable as tests of the vitality of the atmosphere;
their drooping and failure convey to us information
that something is amiss with it. A lady once told me
that she could never raise plants in her parlors on
account of the gas and anthracite coal. I answered,
“Are you not afraid to live and bring up your children
in an atmosphere which blights your plants?” If the
gas escapes from the pipes, and the red-hot anthracite
coal or the red-hot air-tight stove burns out all the
vital part of the air, so that healthy plants in a few
days wither and begin to drop their leaves, it is a sign
that the air must be looked to and reformed. It is a
fatal augury for a room that plants cannot be made
to thrive in it. Plants should not turn pale, be long-jointed,
long-leaved, and spindling; and where they
grow in this way, we may be certain that there is a
want of vitality for human beings. But where plants
appear as they do in the open air, with vigorous, stocky
growth, and short-stemmed, deep-green leaves, we may
believe the conditions of that atmosphere are healthy
for human lungs.

It is pleasant to see how the custom of plant-growing
has spread through our country. In how many
farm-house windows do we see petunias and nasturtiums
vivid with bloom while snows are whirling without,

and how much brightness have those cheap enjoyments
shed on the lives of those who cared for
them! We do not believe there is a human being
who would not become a passionate lover of plants,
if circumstances once made it imperative to tend upon
and watch the growth of one. The history of Picciola
for substance has been lived over and over by many
a man and woman who once did not know that there
was a particle of plant-love in their souls. But to the
proper care of plants in pots there are many hindrances
and drawbacks. The dust chokes the little
pores of their green lungs, and they require constant
showering; and to carry all one's plants to a sink or
porch for this purpose is a labor which many will not
endure. Consequently plants often do not get a showering
once a month! We should try to imitate more
closely the action of Mother Nature, who washes
every green child of hers nightly with dews, which lie
glittering on its leaves till morning.

“Yes, there it is!” said Jenny. “I think I could
manage with plants, if it were not for this eternal
showering and washing they seem to require to keep
them fresh. They are always tempting one to spatter
the carpet and surrounding furniture, which are not
equally benefited by the libation.”

“It is partly for that very reason,” I replied, “that

the plan of `our house' provides for the introduction
of Mother Earth, as you will see.”

A perfect house, according to my idea, should always
include in it a little compartment where plants
can be kept, can be watered, can be defended from
the dust, and have the sunshine and all the conditions
of growth.

People have generally supposed a conservatory to
be one of the last trappings of wealth, — something
not to be thought of for those in modest circumstances.
But is this so? You have a bow-window in your parlor.
Leave out the flooring, fill the space with rich
earth, close it from the parlor by glass doors, and you
have room for enough plants and flowers to keep you
gay and happy all winter. If on the south side, where
the sunbeams have power, it requires no heat but that
which warms the parlor; and the comfort of it is incalculable,
and the expense a mere trifle greater than
that of the bow-window alone.

In larger houses a larger space might be appropriated
in this way. We will not call it a conservatory,
because that name suggests ideas of gardeners,
and mysteries of culture and rare plants, which
bring all sorts of care and expense in their train.
We would rather call it a greenery, a room floored
with earth, with glass sides to admit the sun, — and

let it open on as many other rooms of the house as
possible.

Why should not the dining-room and parlor be all
winter connected by a spot of green and flowers, with
plants, mosses, and ferns for the shadowy portions,
and such simple blooms as petunias and nasturtiums
garlanding the sunny portion near the windows?
If near the water-works, this greenery might be enlivened
by the play of a fountain, whose constant
spray would give that softness to the air which is
so often burned away by the dry heat of the furnace.

“And do you really think, papa, that houses built
in this way are a practical result to be aimed at?”
said Jenny. “To me it seems like a dream of the
Alhambra.”

“Yet I happen to have seen real people in our day
living in just such a house,” said I. “I could point
you, this very hour, to a cottage, which in style of
building is the plainest possible, which unites many
of the best ideas of a true house. My dear, can
you sketch the ground plan of that house we saw in
Brighton?”

“Here it is,” said my wife, after a few dashes with
her pencil, — “an inexpensive house, yet one of the
pleasantest I ever saw.”

“This cottage, which might, at the rate of prices
before the war, have been built for five thousand dollars,
has many of the requirements which I seek for
a house. It has two stories, and a tier of very pleasant
attic-rooms, two bathing-rooms, and the water
carried into each story. The parlor and dining-room
both look into a little bower, where a fountain is ever
playing into a little marble basin, and which all the
year through has its green and bloom. It is heated
simply from the furnace by a register, like any other
room of the house, and requires no more care than a
delicate woman could easily give. The brightness and
cheerfulness it brings during our long, dreary winters is
incredible.”

But one caution is necessary in all such appendages.
The earth must be thorougly underdrained to prevent

the vapors of stagnant water, and have a large admixture
of broken charcoal to obviate the consequences
of vegetable decomposition. Great care must be taken
that there be no leaves left to fall and decay on the
ground, since vegetable exhalations poison the air.
With these precautions such a plot will soften and
purify the air of a house.

Where the means do not allow even so small a conservatory,
a recessed window might be fitted with a
deep box, which should have a drain-pipe at the bottom,
and a thick layer of broken charcoal and gravel,
with a mixture of fine wood-soil and sand, for the top
stratum. Here ivies may be planted, which will run
and twine and strike their little tendrils here and there,
and give the room in time the aspect of a bower; the
various greenhouse nasturtiums will make winter gorgeous
with blossoms. In windows unblest by sunshine
— and, alas, such are many! — one can cultivate
ferns and mosses; the winter-growing ferns, of which
there are many varieties, can be mixed with mosses
and woodland flowers.

Early in February, when the cheerless frosts of winter
seem most wearisome, the common blue violet, wood-anemone,
hepatica, or rock-columbine, if planted in
this way, will begin to bloom. The common partridgeberry,
with its brilliant scarlet fruit and dark green
leaves, will also grow finely in such situations, and

have a beautiful effect. These things require daily
showering to keep them fresh, and the moisture arising
from them will soften and freshen the too dry air
of heated winter rooms.

Thus I have been through my four essential elements
in house-building, — air, fire, water, and earth.
I would provide for these before anything else. After
they are secured, I would gratify my taste and fancy
as far as possible in other ways. I quite agree with
Bob in hating commonplace houses, and longing for
some little bit of architectural effect; and I grieve
profoundly that every step in that direction must
cost so muh. I have also a taste for niceness of
finish. I have no objection to silver-plated door-locks
and hinges, none to windows which are an
entire plate of clear glass. I congratulate neighbors
who are so fortunate as to be able to get them; and
after I have put all the essentials into a house, I would
have these too, if I had the means.

But if all my wood-work were to be without groove
or moulding, if my mantels were to be of simple wood,
if my doors were all to be machine-made, and my
lumber of the second quality, I would have my bath-rooms,
my conservatory, my sunny bow-windows, and
my perfect ventilation; and my house would then
be so pleasant, and every one in it in such a cheerful

mood, that it would verily seem to be ceiled with
cedar.

Speaking of ceiling with cedar, I have one thing
more to say. We Americans have a country abounding
in beautiful timber, of whose beauties we know
nothing, on account of the pernicious and stupid habit
of covering it with white paint.

The celebrated zebra-wood with its golden stripes
cannot exceed in quaint beauty the grain of unpainted
chestnut, prepared simply with a coat or two of oil.
The butternut has a rich golden brown, the very darling
color of painters, — a shade so rich, and grain so
beautiful, that it is of itself as charming to look at as
a rich picture. The black-walnut, with its heavy depth
of tone, works in well as an adjunct; and as to oak,
what can we say enough of its quaint and many shadings?
Even common pine, which has been considered
not decent to look upon till hastily shrouded
in a friendly blanket of white paint, has, when oiled
and varnished, the beauty of satin-wood. The second
quality of pine, which has what are called shakes in it,
under this mode of treatment often shows clouds and
veins equal in beauty to the choicest woods. The
cost of such a finish is greatly less than that of the old
method; and it saves those days and weeks of cleaning
which are demanded by white paint, while its general
tone is softer and more harmonious. Experiments in

color may be tried in the combination of these woods,
which at small expense produce the most charming
effects.

As to paper-hangings, we are proud to say that our
American manufacturers now furnish all that can be
desired. There are some branches of design where
artistic, ingenious France must still excel us; but
whoso has a house to fit up, let him first look at
what his own country has to show, and he will be
astonished.

There is one topic in house-building on which I
would add a few words. The difficulty of procuring
and keeping good servants, which must long be one
of our chief domestic troubles, warns us so to arrange
our houses that we shall need as few as possible.
There is the greatest conceivable difference in the
planning and building of houses as to the amount of
work which will be necessary to keep them in respectable
condition. Some houses require a perfect staff
of house-maids; — there are plated hinges to be
rubbed, paint to be cleaned, with intricacies of moulding
and carving which daily consume hours of dusting
to preserve them from a slovenly look. Simple
finish, unpainted wood, a general distribution of water
through the dwelling, will enable a very large house to
be cared for by one pair of hands, and yet maintain
a creditable appearance.

In kitchens one servant may perform the work of
two by a close packing of all the conveniences for
cooking and such arrangements as shall save time and
steps. Washing-day may be divested of its terrors by
suitable provisions for water, hot and cold, by wringers,
which save at once the strength of the linen and
of the laundress, and by drying-closets connected with
ranges, where articles can in a few moments be perfectly
dried. These, with the use of a small mangle,
such as is now common in America, reduce the labors
of the laundry one half.

There are many more things which might be said
of “our house,” and Christopher may, perhaps, find
some other opportunity to say them. For the present
his pen is tired and ceaseth.