how the cooking-stove is to be in a sort of recess by the chimney, with tin-lined doors to shut it out of sight; the wash-boiler at the opposite side, enclosed in the same way, and having a contrivance overhead to carry off the steam; how there are to be cupboards at each side of the wide window, making it a sort of bay, with a wood-box window-seat; how the sink is to be converted into an elegant sideboard by an ornamental cover, and everything else in the room contrived so it can be shut up or folded up out of sight when not in use.  Of course Jane assists, and the combined wisdom of the two is something appalling to ordinary mortals.  I should certainly think the affair was getting serious if anything of the kind ever did turn out as other folks think it ought.  They are wonderfully harmonious now, but I don’t believe Jane will ever be satisfied without a separate dining-room.

[Illustration:  THE OLD, OLD STORY.]

John wishes me to ask what he shall do about warming his house.  Says he has not decided whether to have fireplaces or stoves, grates or a hot-air furnace, steam, hot water, solar heat, or depend on a scolding wife to keep things warm.

Yours truly,

MRS. JOHN.

LETTER XXXVI.

From the Architect.

THE LESSON OF THE ICE-HOUSE.

MRS. JOHN:  Dear Madam,—­Without doubt the affair is getting serious, but do not give yourself any uneasiness as to the issue.  The Divinity that shapes our matrimonial ends is, happily, a wiser power than that which designs our houses, however it may appear to outsiders.  Your friend talks like a gentleman and a scholar.  I admonished him discreetly, promised to study his interesting problem and give him a chapter on ventilation; which, by the way, is so intimately connected with warming, that I may be obliged to make a sort of company letter in answering your husband’s inquiry on that subject.  Tell him, in brief, to use fireplaces if he has a hundred acres of wood-land to clear up; stoves, if he can live without air; grates, if he doesn’t mind the trouble and the ashes; furnace, if he can set it directly under each room and can find one that won’t strangle him some windy night with poison gases; and steam or hot water, if he can run a machine-shop and keep a competent engineer.  Solar heat may be more available than he thinks, but his doubt as to the last-named mode proves that he has no experimental knowledge of it.  Neither have I.

Tell him also to protect his family as carefully as he protects his ice, and the house-warming will be a simple matter.  The conditions are identical, only turned inside out.  In one case the heat is to be kept from penetrating, in the other from escaping, and both require the same treatment; not, perhaps, to the extent of stuffing with sawdust,—­confined air is just as good,—­but the walls and the floors, the roofs and the windows, should be made