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 winter,—­but I don’t believe a child can grow up strong, healthy, and natural, body-wise and soul-wise, unless he has a chance to scrape an acquaintance with Mother Nature with his own hands.  When I stake out John City it will be a city of magnificent distances, in the form of a Greek cross,—­two wide streets crossing each other at right angles in the middle; all the business at the “four corners,” where there will be plenty of short cross streets; the dwellings stretching away for miles on the two broad avenues; house-lots one to ten acres; Union Pacific Railroad will cut through the centre corner-wise; and the Metropolitan Transportation Company, or something else with a big name, will run elegant cars like shuttles through the two main streets, and Mrs. A at the West End can call on Mrs. B at the North, South, or East End, ten miles away, with less trouble than you in your city can go from Salem to Howard Street.

Similarly, Springfield ought to stretch from Longmeadow to Chicopee Street, from Indian Orchard to Agawam.  At all events, if your folks will make the most of their opportunities, it will some day be one of the most charming inland cities on the continent.  Whether there is good sense, public spirit, and patriotism enough to make it so remains to be seen.