veniences, and that utter respectability which would gladly forget that a kitchen has a necessary connec tion with a house. In a different way, if you would have peace, you must still regard the kitchen. It is now the tyrant of the house, and he who builds his house without a prime regard to that, who plans the rest liberally and leaves that to chance, or, when he finds the cost exceeding his ability, lets the pinch come there, may at once give up the thought of a comfortable home. Let the pinch come in your parlors, your furnishings, -the things for your own luxury or the eye of your visitor; but in a home, the kitchen, the cellar, and the closet must stand before these. No house can be a home which is stinted in the useful things, that is narrow and mean in its arrangements for work, and that is one reason why these things all over our towns with "To let" hanging in the windows can never become genuine homes. Another thing that should be thought of is seclusion. The home ought not to be open to the casual eye, or the secrets of it liable to the prying or the propinquity of neighbors. It ought to stand apart, neither subject to overlooking or overhearing. Every family should be brought up distinct from every other family. The house should be within an enclosure sacred to it. The blessed sun and air should not be cut off from it by the intervening of any other house. This is the necessity of cities, which the kind of houses demanded by the city in part remedies; but the cramped homes of the city never come up to the full idea of home. A home should have a yard and a garden. I do not hesitate to say that, as a matter of dollars and cents, it would be better in the end for the individual speculator to lay out each house with a fair garden spot, place it on some general line, employ an architect as well as a carpenter and mason, spend something on shrubs and trees, in short, make a home of it,than to cover all his land with wood and mortar; while it would add to the character of the town, introduce a higher order of population, increase taxable property, and do for the place what men in vain look to churches, schools, horse-railroads, gas, and water to do. The man of thought and intelligence, who wants a permanent abode for his family, will look to the house before he will these other things. If he cannot find a home, these will be a small temptation. Besides, to the well ordering of a family, privacy is absolutely essential. What chance is there for that, where houses stand so near that, through the open windows, inevitably, you hear much that is said, or through a thin partition comes the thrumming of a piano, the scolding of a mother, the crying of the child, the entrance and exit of every guest? This sort of living is only too common. It is a necessity many submit to because they can do no better, while it is a submission which is likely to act unfavorably upon the rising generation, who must get their idea of home from the homes in which they are nurtured. We all know very well that the presence of a guest or a boarder breaks up much of the peculiar life of home, interrupts its free and steady flow. We all know that the vacation we spend at boarding-places is too apt to interfere with home precepts and discipline, Sow tares amid our wheat. How much greater the harm which comes from always living so near to others, so exposed front and rear, and both sides, that inevitably, in spite of you, the daily life of yourself and your children is subject to influences you would gladly be rid of. I do not believe a truly independent home possible — a home standing on its own basis and supported by its own principles as every home should so long as houses are built as a very large majority of those in our neighborhood are. Not as a matter of pride or of mere feeling, but as a matter of principle, I would not occupy a house where I was not or could not be alone. Nearness to one's business, or any thing that could be urged in favor of such a residence, would not weigh as a feather with what could be urged against. I know there are many persons, even fathers and mothers, who will not sympathize with this at all. They would rather live in public. They want to see and hear what is going on. They don't care any thing about yards and gardens. All that can be said of such is, that they are falling into the great American current which sets against the home, whose top folly The man is seen in the life of the New York hotel. who has forgotten the free range his childhood loved over the old farm or through the pastures, and refuses for his children even a garden or a yard, the man who prefers his children should be educated in the street, or turns them to play in some other man's grounds, the man who forgets how much more of good outdoors teaches, in the earlier years, than the costly parlor can, who sacrifices his children's good to his desire for a wider range indoors, or a more costly abode, is traitor to the best memories of his own life, and working against the best life of his child. Contentment with some conditions is only a proof how far man may fall from his true position, yet be unconscious of his fall. The contented slave is the saddest evidence of the atrocity of slavery. Permanence, utility, seclusion, are the three things a man should specially seek in the house he is to call home. In its exterior it should violate no law of taste, while it should be suggestive of the character and position of the inmates. You go through the streets of a city or town, and you inevitably draw your infer ences of the inhabitants from their houses. If you are hungry, or have lost your way, you select the house at which you will ask. Even organ-grinders and peddlers study the outside before venturing within the gate. Some houses suggest vanity, pride, meanness, as surely as some suggest home. I remember that, pacing backward and forward through Fifth Avenue in New York, and marvelling at the prodigality of the cost of that double row of sandstone palaces, I felt the chill of all that splendor striking through me till I came upon a square, sober, though evidently costly house, and I said, This looks like a home. I asked the owner, and from his well-known name I knew that I was right. In the landscape it is the home that satisfies and pleases, of wealth or of show, but the abode nameless grace of home is thrown. I have seen that charm embracing as a halo the little one-story, unpainted wayside cottage, equally with the glorious old gambrel-roof homestead beneath the trees, to me the type and symbol of a New England home. I have seen it invest the home of poverty, while refusing to linger about the abode of pride, a something which seems to radiate from the life within through shingle and clapboard, as the life of the soul speaks in the outward expression of the face and the form. not the abode over which that As a part of the home, a single word of its furnish |