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 everybody 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
housebuilding?"

"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