to prevent the escape of heat.  He may think I underrate his scientific attainments, but it will do no harm to remind him that an air-tight house may be a very cold one.  A man would freeze to death in a glass bottle, when a coarse, porous blanket would keep him comfortable.  Double windows are not to keep cold air out, but to keep the heat in.  India-rubber weather-strips have, doubtless, caused ten times as many influenzas as they have prevented.  More heat will radiate through a window of single glass than would be carried out by the air through a crack, half an inch wide, at the side of it.

These suggestions are “just to set him a thinking.”

LETTER XXXVII.

From John.

SHINGLES, SUNSHINE, AND FRESH AIR.

MY DEAR ARCHITECT:  When I stepped into the background, I didn’t propose to be left entirely out in the cold.  I’ve followed Fred through the most of his gropings after grandeur, and listened patiently to one of Jane’s dignified essays on the sublimity of housekeeping; but when my wife begins romancing, and the schoolmaster is allowed to run wild, as though his moonshine was brighter than that of other folks, I think it’s time to call the meeting to order.

While you have been gossiping I have been at work, and now our house is almost done,—­that is to say, it’s well begun.  The stone walls of the first story are finished, the frame is raised and covered.  I’ve done one thing without asking anybody’s advice; covered the roof with the best cedar shingles I could find.  I hired an honest man to lay them, who would throw out all that were dubious and lay the cross-grained ones right side up, and painted the tin valleys both sides before the shingles were laid.  Then I took the difference in cost between this and a good slate roof and put it in the savings-bank.  At the end of twenty years, if my roof lasts as long, my deposit will put on the best kind of a slate roof and leave three hundred dollars to go to the Society for the Promotion of Fine Art in General and Rural Architecture in Particular.  I know the shingled roof may burn me up, if the chimney should happen to take fire some windy night, but ’t won’t cost so much for repairs as slate if they should blow over, either all at once, or one brick at a time.  My neighbors may not like the looks, especially while it’s new; but if we have nothing uglier than a mellow gray-shingled roof, I don’t think anybody’ll be hurt.  I wish we had something like the tile roofs I’ve seen in foreign pictures.  They’d go first-rate with my stone walls.

The eave-spouts bother me.  I don’t need to save the water from the roof, and have concluded to let it pour where it pleases.  The porches protect the doorsteps, and I think it will be easier to take care of it after it falls than to hang gutters all around emptying at the corners and angles.  They are troublesome things anyway.  The leaves clog them, the ice dams them, the snow comes down in an avalanche and smashes them, they fall to leaking and spoil the cornice, and after they are all done there’s no certainty that the water won’t run the wrong way.  I can put them up afterwards if necessary, but don’t believe it will be.