ursery."

"No, I do _not_ mean a nursery, but a workshop, study, gymnasium, call
it anything you please. The floor should be smooth and hard, and the
walls should be wainscoted with smooth, hard wood. There should be
blackboards and shelves at the sides, and the children should be
allowed to drive nails wherever they please. I am not sure but I would
have a sink and a water faucet."

"Not unless the room is in the cellar or has a floor tight enough for a
swimming tank. Well, what next?"

"We must have a hospital."

"For inebriates or the insane?"

"A room similar to the private wards in a hospital. You know our own
and the children's sleeping rooms are very simply furnished, but a sick
room should be still more severe. The children have both had the
measles, thank goodness, and I hope they never will have smallpox,
scarlet fever, or diphtheria, but if they should it would be necessary
to send them away from home or run the risk of their exposing one
another."

"You might as well include every other ill that flesh is heir to. If we
have got to fight germs day and night in order to live, the cleaner and
more open we can keep the battle ground the better. It strikes me that
it might be a good thing to have the whole house sort of clean and
wholesome."

"Of course. But none of us would like to have the living rooms as
absolutely bare of all superfluous furnishing as a hospital ward. We
should not be willing to give up our rugs, take down the curtains,
throw away the cushions and sit in hard wooden chairs."

"No, and I wouldn't like to burn my books, although there is nothing
quite so 'germy' as my musty old books that were made in Italy in
plague times and smell like the 16th century every time they are
opened. So I suppose we must have a hospital for the children to be
sick in, a workshop for them to work in, and what would you say to a
small chapel and penitentiary, with a dungeon or two? While we are
about it, let's have a market and cold storage annex."

"Precisely what I was going to suggest. It would be the easiest thing
in the world to attach a small room to the cellar or the kitchen, where
a low temperature can be kept at all times, either by ice or by the
artificial refrigeration that will soon be distributed and sold in the
same way that gas, water, steam, electric light and power are now
furnished in many cities."

"I never thought of it before, but why shouldn't milk and beer and
other medicinal dr