et little nook, and you have only to turn your stop-cocks and
all is ready, your remedy is at hand, you use it constantly. You are
waked in the night by a scream, and find little Tom sitting up, wild
with burning fever. In three minutes he is in the bath, quieted and
comfortable; you get him back, cooled and tranquil, to his little
crib, and in the morning he wakes as if nothing had happened.

Why should not so invaluable and simple a remedy for disease, such a
preservative of health, such a comfort, such a stimulus, be considered
as much a matter-of-course in a house as a kitchen-chimney? At least
there should be one bath-room always in order, so arranged that all
the family can have access to it, if one cannot afford the luxury of
many.

A house in which water is universally and skillfully distributed is so
much easier to take care of as almost to verify the saying of a
friend, that his house was so contrived that it did its own work: one
had better do without carpets on the floors, without stuffed sofas and
rocking-chairs, and secure this.

* * * * *

"Well, papa," said Marianne, "you have made out all your four elements
in your house, except one. I can't imagine what you want of _earth_."

"I thought," said Jenny, "that the less of our common mother we had in
our houses, the better housekeepers we were."

"My dears," said I, "we philosophers must give an occasional dip into
the mystical, and say something apparently absurd for the purpose of
explaining that we mean nothing in particular by it. It gives common
people an idea of our sagacity, to find how clear we come out of our
apparent contradictions and absurdities. Listen."

* * * * *

For the fourth requisite of "our house," EARTH, let me point you to
your mother's plant-window, and beg you to remember the fact that
through our long, dreary winters we are never a month without flowers,
and the vivid interest which always attaches to growing things. The
perfect house, as I conceive it, is to combine as many of the
advantages of living out of doors as may be consistent with warmth and
shelter, and one of these is the sympathy with green and growing
things. Plants are nearer in their relations to human health and vigor
than is often imagined. The cheerfulness that well-kept plants impart
to a room comes not merely from gratification of the eye,--there is a
healthful exhalation from them, they are