-books are mere murder to such
constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. We require to ponder these
things, and think how we in our climate and under our circumstances
ought to live, and, in doing so, we may, without accusation of foreign
foppery, take some leaves from many foreign books.

* * * * *

But Christopher has prosed long enough. I must now read this to my
wife, and see what she says.

XI

OUR HOUSE

Our gallant Bob Stephens, into whose lifeboat our Marianne has been
received, has lately taken the mania of housebuilding 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 housebuilding 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
overhead, and finished mediaevally with ultramarine blue and
gilding,--and then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns of
bookshelves 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 upstairs 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 an