ging your charmingly good-for-nothing
air-castle for an actual flesh-and-blood, matter-of-fact
dwelling-house, two-storied and French-roofed it may be, with all the
modern improvements. In many respects, you will find the real house
far less satisfactory and more perplexing than the creation of your
fancy. Air-castles have some splendid qualities. There are no masons'
and carpenters' contracts to be made, no plumbers' bills to be vexed
over, the furnaces never smoke, and the water-pipes never freeze; they
need no insurance, and you have no vain regrets over mistakes in your
plans, for you may have alterations and additions whenever you please
without making a small pandemonium and eating dust and ashes while
they are in process. Nevertheless, I have no doubt you will plunge at
once into the mysteries and miseries of building, and, knowing your
inexperience, I cannot at such a juncture leave you wholly to your own
devices.

It is a solemn thing to build even the outside of a house. You not
only influence your fellow-men, but reveal your own character; for
houses have a facial expression as marked as that of human beings,
often strangely like their owners, and, in most cases, far more
lasting. Some destroy your faith in human nature, and give you an ague
chill when you pass them; others look impudently defiant, while many
make you cry out, "Vanity of vanities!" If you are disposed to
investigate the matter, you will find that the history of nations may
be clearly traced in the visible moral expression of the homes of the
people;--in the portable home-tents of the Arabs; the homely solidity
of the houses in Germany and Holland; the cheerful, wide-spreading
hospitality of Switzerland; the superficial elegance and extravagance
of France; the thoroughness and self-assertion of the English; and in
the heterogeneous conglomerations of America, made up of importations
from every land and nation under the sun,--a constant striving and
changing,--a mass of problems yet unsolved.

A friend once said to me while we were passing an incurably ugly
house, "The man who built that must have had a very good excuse for
it!" It was a profound remark, but if that particular building were
the only one needing apology for its ugliness, or if there were no
common faults of construction and interior arrangement, I should not
think you in special need of warning or counsel from me. There are,
however, so many ill-looking and badly contrived hou