*

"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 Jennie, "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 a corrective of the impurities of the atmosphere. Plants,
too, are valuable as tests of the vitality of the atmosphere; their
drooping and failure convey to us information that something is amiss
with it. A lady once told me that she could never raise plants in her
parlors on account of the gas and anthracite coal. I answered, "Are you
not afraid to live and bring up your children in an atmosphere which
blights your plants?" If the gas escapes from the pipes, and the red-hot
anthracite coal or the red-hot air-tight stove burns out all the vital
part of the air, so that healthy plants in a few days wither and begin
to drop their leaves, it is a sign that the air must be looked to and
reformed. It is a fatal augury for a room that plants cannot be made to
thrive in it. Plants should not turn pale, be long-jointed, long-leaved,
and spindling; and where they grow in this way, we may be certain that
there is a want of vitality for human beings. But where plants appear as
they do in the open air, with vigorous, stocky growth, and
short-stemmed, deep-green leaves, we may believe the conditions