Certainly no one who has looked out on an exhilarating summer morning upon the sun-bathed landscape from the top of a high house can have failed to feel that the delicious air and the soul-inspiring vision made him feel nearer heaven, if heaven be perfect peace and hope and love. But you cannot always be enjoying the outspread splendors of the seas and mountains, the dales and rivulets, nor can you live among the heavenly bodies. There are earthly bodies to be thought of as well as heavenly, and there is a science of gastronomy as well as of astronomy. Now, a great many house builders spend a great deal of taste and art and money upon a drawing-room which they seldom HOME ARCHITECTURE. 373 enter, whose doors are locked and whose furniture is covered, while they think that any odd corner, so it be near the water supply and the fence, will do for a kitchen. A vast deal of discomfort in the house arises from this foolish estimate of the relative uses of rooms and the spurious preference of show and ornament for real utility. Better do without your show drawing-room altogether, if your house is to be a small one, and be content with a real good dining-room, and a " thorough " kitchen with everything needed for physical com- fort and health in the apparatus of cooking, washing, churning, bread and pie making, so that whether your family and guests be few or many, and your meals simple or elaborate, you may have everything in comfort, and your cook may feel the kitchen a home for her skill, not a box in which she can do nothing properly and have notliing in order. For want of just such foresight and thorough prearrange- ment and predestination of every part, many villas and fine houses have been built by wealthy persons which have afterward been called their " folly," for the want of prudence and good sense displayed in them. Sometimes they have thought that so long as the building covered a big area, it would be "just the thing." So they have con- structed what looks like a row of rooms opening into each other by interminable doors, the appearance of which outside is like a row of toy cottages strung together, and the feeling of which inside is that one is occupying no room in particular, but is passing through a suite, as a conductor passes through a line of steam-cars when he takes the tickets. It is really extraordinary the way in which some house builders rejoice in innumerable doors, while they seem to think that closets are altogether superfluous. Their idea seems to be that the proper feeling on entering a house should be that it is a good house to get out of, and therefore they supply the facilities for "going in at one door and out at the other." The subject of doors, closets, and staircases is of very great im- portance in the building of a house. Many houses have doors and staircases made like traps in the old feudal castles in which, through a trap-door, an undesirable guest went down impromptu into the 374 THE hearthstone; or, life at home.

AI-modernized reading of the original text

Certainly no one who has looked out on an exhilarating summer morning upon the sun-bathed landscape from the top of a high house can have failed to feel that the delicious air and the soul-inspiring vision made him feel nearer heaven, if heaven be perfect peace and hope and love. But you cannot always be enjoying the outspread splendors of the seas and mountains, the dales and rivulets, nor can you live among the heavenly bodies. There are earthly bodies to be thought of as well as heavenly, and there is a science of gastronomy as well as of astronomy. Now, a great many house builders spend a great deal of taste and art and money upon a drawing-room which they seldom enter, whose doors are locked and whose furniture is covered, while they think that any odd corner, so it be near the water supply and the fence, will do for a kitchen. A vast deal of discomfort in the house arises from this foolish estimate of the relative uses of rooms and the spurious preference of show and ornament for real utility. Better do without your show drawing-room altogether, if your house is to be a small one, and be content with a real good dining-room, and a " thorough " kitchen with everything needed for physical comfort and health in the apparatus of cooking, washing, churning, bread and pie making, so that whether your family and guests be few or many, and your meals simple or elaborate, you may have everything in comfort, and your cook may feel the kitchen a home for her skill, not a box in which she can do nothing properly and have nothing in order. For want of just such foresight and thorough prearrangement and predestination of every part, many villas and fine houses have been built by wealthy persons which have afterward been called their " folly," for the want of prudence and good sense displayed in them. Sometimes they have thought that so long as the building covered a big area, it would be "just the thing." So they have constructed what looks like a row of rooms opening into each other by interminable doors, the appearance of which outside is like a row of toy cottages strung together, and the feeling of which inside is that one is occupying no room in particular, but is passing through a suite, as a conductor passes through a line of steam-cars when he takes the tickets. It is really extraordinary the way in which some house builders rejoice in innumerable doors, while they seem to think that closets are altogether superfluous. Their idea seems to be that the proper feeling on entering a house should be that it is a good house to get out of, and therefore they supply the facilities for "going in at one door and out at the other." The subject of doors, closets, and staircases is of very great importance in the building of a house. Many houses have doors and staircases made like traps in the old feudal castles in which, through a trap-door, an undesirable guest went down impromptu into the 374 THE hearthstone; or, life at home.

The hearthstone; or, Life at home