t trouble, let me
remind him that the old house was General Ward's headquarters at the
breaking out of the Revolution; that the plan for fortifying Bunker's
Hill was laid, as commonly believed, in the southeast lower room, the
floor of which was covered with dents, made, it was alleged, by the
butts of the soldiers' muskets. In that house, too, General Warren
probably passed the night before the Bunker Hill battle, and over its
threshold must the stately figure of Washington have often cast its
shadow.

But the house in which one drew his first breath, and where he one day
came into the consciousness that he was a personality, an ego, a little
universe with a sky over him all his own, with a persistent identity,
with the terrible responsibility of a separate, independent, inalienable
existence,--that house does not ask for any historical associations to
make it the centre of the earth for him.

If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who is
born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions and
the means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to his own
taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic features which
surrounded his earliest years. The American is, for the most part, a
nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls up his tent-poles.
If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would be something like this:

His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained,
large-hearted country minister, from whom he should inherit the
temperament that predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the
finer instincts which direct life to noble aims and make it rich with
the gratification of pure and elevated tastes and the carrying out of
plans for the good of his neighbors and his fellow-creatures. He should,
if possible, have been born, at any rate have passed some of his early
years, or a large part of them, under the roof of the good old minister.
His father should be, we will say, a business man in one of our great
cities,--a generous manipulator of millions, some of which have adhered
to his private fortunes, in spite of his liberal use of his means. His
heir, our ideally placed American, shall take possession of the old
house, the home of his earliest memories, and preserve it sacredly,
not exactly like the Santa Casa, but, as nearly as may be, just as
he remembers it. He can add as many acres as he will to the narrow
house-lot. He can build a