make it the centre of the earth for him.

If there is any person in the world to be envied, it is the one who is
born to an ancient estate, with a long line of family traditions and the
means in his hands of shaping his mansion and his domain to his own
taste, without losing sight of all the characteristic features which
surrounded his earliest years. The American is, for the most part, a
nomad, who pulls down his house as the Tartar pulls up his tent-poles.
If I had an ideal life to plan for him it would be something like this:

His grandfather should be a wise, scholarly, large-brained, large-hearted
country minister, from whom he should inherit the temperament that
predisposes to cheerfulness and enjoyment, with the finer instincts which
direct life to noble aims and make it rich with the gratification of pure
and elevated tastes and the carrying out of plans for the good of his
neighbors and his fellow-creatures. He should, if possible, have been
born, at any rate have passed some of his early years, or a large part of
them, under the roof of the good old minister. His father should be, we
will say, a business man in one of our great cities,--a generous
manipulator of millions, some of which have adhered to his private
fortunes, in spite of his liberal use of his means. His heir, our
ideally placed American, shall take possession of the old house, the home
of his earliest memories, and preserve it sacredly, not exactly like the
Santa Casa, but, as nearly as may be, just as he remembers it. He can
add as many acres as he will to the narrow house-lot. He can build a
grand mansion for himself, if he chooses, in the not distant
neighborhood. But the old house, and all immediately round it, shall be
as he recollects it when he had to stretch his little arm up to reach the
door-handles. Then, having well provided for his own household, himself
included, let him become the providence of the village or the town where