can be placed so that throwing open the doors from room to room or across the hall will reveal a charming prospect in opposite directions, there’s a sense of being in the midst of an all-surrounding beauty, hardly possible when you seem to look upon it from one side only.  You have surely been abiding in a city.  The interior of your house is all that concerns you or your family.  The outside—­French roof and fashionable finish, forsooth!—­is for the public to admire.  They are not to have any intimation what sort of a home is sheltered by your monstrous Mansard; and it never occurs to you that there can be anything out of doors worth building your house to see.

[Illustration:  “Look out, not in.”]

Here is another unhappy result of evil examples,—­the sliding-doors between the two parlors, as you call them,—­an arrangement convenient enough, sometimes indispensable in houses built on crowded streets, houses that only breathe the dusty air and catch the struggling sunbeams at their narrow and remote extremities,—­air and sunlight at nobody knows how many hundred dollars the front foot.  They are worse than useless in such a house as yours.

I say your plan is scarcely a beginning; the same of this letter.  But it’s enough for once.

LETTER XXIV.

From Fred.

In A multitude of counsellors is safety.

My dear architect:  Your criticisms are not wholly without reason.  I can only plead haste and inexperience.

Have been studying arrangement of rear part, and seem to get farther and farther from a satisfactory result.  The kitchen and dining-room must be convenient to each other, but not adjacent; the pantries and larder easy to get at; back stairs accessible from all parts of the house, and side entrance worked in somehow; washbowl and water-closet not far off, but out of sight, and the whole department quite isolated from front hall.  My wife can’t think of pantry and store-rooms at the south side, nor do we want kitchen or outer door at the north.  John’s sister-in-law, Miss Jane, who appears to have some sensible notions, thinks a kitchen should always have windows on opposite sides for light and ventilation.  John says I should have a kitchen large enough for wash-trays and a set kettle, but one of my neighbors, who has just built a house, advises a laundry in the cellar.  Altogether it’s a troublesome problem, and, frankly, I give it up.

Do you really expect us to dispense with sliding-doors between the parlors?  I’m sure that won’t pass.  We would almost as soon give up the bay-windows,—­everybody has them nowadays.

Truly,

Fred.

LETTER XXV.

From the Architect.

Doors and sliding-doors, windows and bay-windows.