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“It is not any larger than is necessary,” said my wife, thoughtfully; “nothing is gained by taking off from it.”

“What if you should put it all down into a basement,” suggests Bob, “and so get it all out of sight together?”

“Never, if it can be helped,” said my wife. “Basement kitchens are necessary evils, only to be tolerated in cities where land is too dear to afford any other.”

So goes the discussion till the trio agree to sleep over it. The next morning an inspiration visits my wife’s pillow. She is up and seizes plans and paper, and, before six o’clock, has enlarged the parlor very cleverly by throwing out a bow-window. So waxes and wanes the prospective house, innocently battered down and rebuilt with India-rubber and black-lead. Doors are cut out to-night and walled up to-morrow; windows knocked out here and put in there, as some observer suggests possibilities of too much or too little draught. Now all seems finished, when, lo! a discovery! There is no fireplace nor stove-flue in my lady’s bedroom, and can be none without moving the bathing-room. Pencil and India-rubber are busy again, and for a while the whole house seems to threaten to fall to pieces with the confusion of the moving; the bath-room wanders like a ghost, now invading a closet, now threatening the tranquillity of the parlor, till at last it is laid, by some unheard-of calculations of my wife’s, and sinks to rest in a place so much better that everybody wonders it never was thought of before.

“Papa,” said Jenny, “it appears to me people don’t exactly know what they want when they build; why don’t you write a paper on housebuilding?”

“I have thought of it,” said I, with the air of a man called to settle some great reform. “It must be entirely because Christopher has not written that our young people and mamma are tangling themselves daily in webs which are untangled the next day.”

“You see,” said Jenny, “they have only just so much money, and they want everything they can think of under the sun. There’s Bob been studying architectural antiquities, and nobody knows what, and sketching all sorts of curly-whorlies; and Marianne has her notions about a parlor and boudoir and china closets and bedroom closets; and Bob wants a baronial hall; and mamma stands out for linen closets and bathing-rooms and all that; and so, among them all it will just end in getting them head over ears in debt.”

The thing struck me as not improbable.

“I don’t know, Jenny, whether my writing an article is going to prevent all this; but as my time in the ‘Atlantic’ is coming round, I may as well write on what I am obliged to think of, and so I will give a paper on the subject to enliven our next evening’s session.”

So that evening, when Bob and Marianne had dropped in as usual, and while the customary work of drawing and rubbing out was going on at Mrs. Crowfield’s sofa, I produced my paper and read as follows:–

OUR HOUSE

There is a place, called “our house,” which everybody knows of. The sailor talks of it in his dreams at sea. The wounded soldier, turning in his uneasy hospital-bed, brightens at the word; it is like 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.