My dear architect: We read, we saw, and--were conquered. The pictures,
the arguments, and especially the illustrious examples, brought down
the house, or rather brought it up. Mrs. John is not only fully
reconciled to stone walls, but she is decidedly unreconciled to any
other,--that is, for the first story; the second story is to be of
wood, the walls shingled or slated instead of being covered with
clapboards, in the orthodox fashion. She is delighted with the notion
that her "Baltimore belles" and the like can clamber against the
house without being torn away every two or three years for paint. On
the strength of this notion, she has already ordered a big lot of all
sorts of herbs and creeping things, from grape-vines and English ivy
to sweet-peas and passion-flowers. That's only one thing. Every time
we go out to ride she gathers up from the wayside such a load of small
rocks as makes the buggy-springs ache. We found a smooth round stone,
yesterday, that looks so much like my head she declares it must be a
fossil, and is bound to have it set over the front door instead of a
monogram. We follow your lead in another direction; if we can't rise
in the world without going up stairs for it, we'll try to cultivate
the meek and lowly style.

Your best point, according to my thinking, is on the migration
question. I read that paragraph over twice, and stuck a pin at the end
of it. It doesn't concern me, to be sure; but I have the utmost pity
for a man who is content to live all his life shut in between brick
walls. To undertake to bring up a family of boys and girls where all
the blessed freedom of out-door life is denied them, is worse than
pitiful,--it's heathenish. Not that every boy ought to live on a farm
and work in a barn-yard,--hoe corn all summer and chop wood all