the
dropping of cool water in the desert, like the touch of cool fingers
on a burning brow. "Our house," he says feebly, and the light comes
back into his dim eyes; for all homely charities, all fond thoughts,
all purities, all that man loves on earth or hopes for in heaven, rise
with the word.

"Our house" may be in any style of architecture, low or high. It may
be the brown old farmhouse, with its tall wellsweep, or the one-story
gambrel-roofed cottage, or the large, square, white house, with green
blinds, under the wind-swung elms of a century; or it may be the
log-cabin of the wilderness, with its one room,--still there is a
spell in the memory of it beyond all conjurations. Its stone and brick
and mortar are like no other; its very clapboards and shingles are
dear to us, powerful to bring back the memories of early days and all
that is sacred in home love.

* * * * *

"Papa is getting quite sentimental," whispered Jenny, loud enough for
me to hear. I shook my head at her impressively, and went on
undaunted.

* * * * *

There is no one fact of our human existence that has a stronger
influence upon us than the house we dwell in, especially that in which
our earlier and more impressible years are spent. The building and
arrangement of a house influence the health, the comfort, the morals,
the religion. There have been houses built so devoid of all
consideration for the occupants, so rambling and haphazard in the
disposal of rooms, so sunless and cheerless and wholly without
snugness or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a joyous,
generous, rational, religious family life in them.

There are, we shame to say, in our cities _things_ called houses,
built and rented by people who walk erect and have the general air and
manner of civilized and Christianized men, which are so inhuman in
their building that they can only be called snares and traps for
souls,--places where children cannot well escape growing up filthy and
impure; places where to form a home is impossible, and to live a
decent, Christian life would require miraculous strength.

A celebrated British philanthropist, who had devoted much study to the
dwellings of the poor, gave it as his opinion that the temperance
societies were a hopeless undertaking in London unless these dwellings
underwent a transformation. They were so squalid, so dark, so
comfortless, so constantly pressin