furnished your honest carpenter with a stout jack-knife, and required
him not only to lay the shingles right side up, but to lay the upper
ends close together, leaving them apart at the butt. Gutters are
troublesome truly, but often indispensable; there is no resource but
to have them thoroughly made. Poor ones are worse than none. Those
that hang independently of the cornice are safest for cheaper
buildings, but should be treated as an essential feature; that is, you
should not complete the cornice without a gutter and afterwards
disfigure it by a sloping spout having no apparent kinship to the rest
of the finish.

The problem of warming and ventilating is easily solved for those who
desire its solution sufficiently to make the necessary appropriations.
One quarter of what is commonly spent for vanity and deceit will be
ample. Most men and women, at least the unthinking, prefer fashionable
show rather than health! A fearful statement, but sadly true. There is
doubtless more danger from impure air than from cold. Our senses warn
us quickly of the latter; the prompting of knowledge is needed to
guard us against the former,--of a practical knowledge unfortunately
rare. Men, women, and children are dying daily through ignorance and
indifference on this subject. There is hardly a school-house to be
found in which the murder of the innocents is not continually
rehearsed, hardly a church in which the spiritual elevation resulting
from attendance therein is not counterbalanced by an equal physical
depression, and rarely a hall or lecture-room wherein an audience can
even listen to a physiological discourse on the fatal effects of
impure air without experimentally knowing that they are listening to
solemn truth; while as to the dwelling-houses, the homes of the dear
people, it requires no bloodhound's scent to distinguish them one from
another! The moment the front door is opened to me, I am assailed by