can only be removed by great expense and trouble! It's a grand thing
to go ahead, provided you are right; the more "go," the worse, if you
happen to be on the wrong track. Candidly, your plan hardly deserves
to be called a beginning. The arrangement of the rear part, which you
chiefly omit, is, in fact, the most difficult and important of the
whole. But I've promised Sister Jane a chapter on kitchens, of which,
when the time comes, you can have the benefit. Meanwhile, complete the
unfinished part of your plan,--it only requires you to spend a few
brief moments,--and I will venture some suggestions on this which lies
before me.

The front stairs as laid down would reach just half-way to the second
floor,--a peculiarity of amateur sketches so universal that we will
say nothing more about it. But what principle of good taste or
hospitality requires you to blockade the main entrance to your house
with this same staircase? Do you send all your visitors, of whatever
name or nation, direct to the upper regions the moment they enter?
Why, then, make the northwest passage thither the most conspicuous
route from the door? Do you intend to restrict the family to the back
stairs, which by your showing are, like the famous _descensus Averno_,
wonderfully easy to go down, but mighty hard to get up again? Yet you
place these front stairs at the very farthest remove from the rooms
most constantly used in both stories. Perhaps you propose to announce
"apartments to let" on the second and third floors. No? What reason,
then, for imitating hotels, lodging-houses, double-barrelled
tenements, and other public and semi-public buildings from which a
short cut to the street is essential? Don't tell me you wish them to
be ornamental as well as useful. I know that; but remember the stairs
are built for the house, not the house for the stairs. You had better
lose them wholly as an ornamental feature, than destroy the charm of