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 is seen in the life of the New York hotel. The man 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, not the abode of wealth or of show, but the abode over which that 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, 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.

- to me

As a part of the home, a single word of its furnish

ing. In proportion as you introduce splendor, you banish love. No child can grow up to love a house so adorned that he associates with it the perpetual warning to be careful of his hands and feet, all the freedom of whose motions must be checked by the cost of the carpet and the material of the sofa.If there must be a company-room, to be kept sacred from the intrusion of the child's foot, then let there be special pains that there be some room sacred to childhood, the wild domain of disorder and frolic, where things may be banged and broken according to the laws of an innocent misrule, without fear of rebuke. The furniture of home should be for use, and every adorning subsidiary to propriety and taste. The papers upon the wall, the casts, engravings, ornaments, should all have reference to home culture; not stiff or ugly or over many, but such as, living with the child, insensibly educate and elevate his taste, as living with virtue insensibly educates and elevates his character. A house that chills a stranger with the idea that its furnishings are to be seen and not used, which reveals no trace of childhood, or only of childhood prematurely prim, rooms stiff and bristling and suggestive of the upholsterer, is no home. How gladly one escapes from all this drear array of show to some cosey, free-and-easy, comfortable room, whose furniture bears the marks of use, where there

are no angles and straight lines, but the unstudied order, or the equally unstudied disorder, of a free and happy household.

The idea of a home cannot be independent of the house. I do not deny that there are homes where there is no advantage of the house; still, to the perfect idea of the perfect home the house is essential;

not a house of cost, but a house appropriate to the condition of the occupant, a permanent, useful, secluded abode, a place not for the guest, but for the family, not for the adult merely, but for the child. The idea every man should have in building ought to be to build a home, whether the house be for his own occupancy or to let. It is time there was a little more humanity in landlords, and that public opinion rebuked this coining of money at the expense of the finer sentiments of the heart and home. We have had a precious inheritance in the old homes of New England. Our fathers builded better than they knew when they erected them, and he shall be the benefactor of his children who shall, under altered circumstances of time and place, transmit to his children a true home; and he shall stand highest among architects who shall strive, not to build the churches, the capitals, the monuments of the nation, but who shall give himself to the skilful planning of homes for the people, a work Downing had so nobly begun when