ble, its
minutest details, otherwise he fails inevitably, and the place is
given to his well-qualified competitor. If our prospective
housekeepers were amenable to similar rules, the competent mistresses
of this most useful art would find plenty of apprentices glad to serve
them long and well for their tuition, and if those who have now the
care of households will patiently instruct their help, they will find
abundant recompense in a more faithful and efficient service.

Doubtless we must wait a little longer for our lost Eden to be
restored by the angels of the household; but, in the hastening of that
good time, such examples, permit me to say, as your own will be worth
far more than any multiplying of conveniences and labor-saving
machines for the benefit of those who do not know or care to learn
how to use them,--examples of the nobleness, the gentility if you
please, of all useful labor. Until that everlasting truth is
understood and applied, there will be more need of your teaching than
of my plans. If you will teach your neighbors what a fully equipped
home building should contain, I will try to show them how their wants
can be supplied. Teach them, at the same time, what it need not
contain. As certain folks do not understand how heaven can be
enjoyable without a Tartarean attachment to which all disagreeable
people and performances are consigned, so a common notion of home,
that earthly epitome of heaven, appears to be that it should also
contain an abridgment of the same direful institution; that there must
be somewhere in the house a place of torment, the angels who abide
therein, giving us our daily bread and doughnuts, being of a totally
different type from the glorious creatures singing songs of praise
and operatic melodies in the upper stories. That the genius of the
kitchen and the parlor can be one and the same is a conception too
stupendous for the average understanding.

This, too, I hope you will insist upon. Every man who would build
himself a house shall first sit down and--not count the cost, that
comes into my department, but--ask himself solemnly what the house is
for. To live in, of course. But living is a complex affair; it is
constant growth or gradual death; there can be no standing still. Is
the house to be an end, or a means; a help to make the life-work
larger and better, or an added burden? Shall it lift, or crush him?
When this solemn questioning is honestly done, we shall have a new