than the size of the smallest
bath-tub--it won't require so much work to keep in order. The kitchen
won't be very much larger, but this will make it easy for the cook. In
place of a drawing-room, there will be a large living-room--fourteen by
six. The walls of this room will be covered with books, and it can serve
as library and smoking-room as well. Then, the floor-space not being
occupied, we shall use the room as a dining-room. Incidentally, such a
room not being used after bedtime, the cook and the second boy can sleep
in it. One thing that I am temperamentally opposed to is waste, and why
should all this splendid room be wasted at night when we do not occupy
it?

My ideas are cramped, you say?--Oh, I forgot to tell you that this home I
am describing is to be a floating home, and that my wife and I are to
journey around the world in it for the matter of seven years or more. I
forgot also to state that there will be an engine-room in it for a
seventy-horse-power engine, a dynamo, storage batteries, etc.; tanks for
water to last long weeks at sea; space for fifteen hundred gallons of
gasolene, fire extinguishers, and life-preservers; and a great store-room
for food, spare sails, anchors, hawsers, tackles, and a thousand and one
other things.

Since I have not yet built my land house, I haven't got beyond a few
general ideas, and in presenting them I feel as cocksure as the unmarried
woman who writes the column in the Sunday supplement on how to rear
children. My first idea about a house is that it should be built to live
in. Throughout the house, in all the building of it, this should be the
paramount idea. It must be granted that this idea is lost sight of by
countless persons who build houses apparently for every purpose under the
sun except to live in them.

Perhaps it is because of the practical life I have lived that I worship
utility and have come to believe that utility and beauty should be one,
and that there is no utility that need not be beautiful. What finer
beauty than strength--whether it be airy steel, or massive masonry, or a
woman's hand? A plain black leather strap is beautiful. It is all
strength and all utility, and it is beautiful. It efficiently performs
work in the world, and it is good to look upon. Perhaps it is because it
is useful that it is beautiful. I do not know. I sometimes wonder.

A boat on the sea is beautiful. Yet it is not built for beauty. Every
graceful line