DEAR JOHN:  Your economical reasons for using shingles would justify cheap jewelry and rag carpets.  Try to be consistent.  I should object to slate on a log-barn or shingles on a stone-house.  I hope you 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 the odor peculiar to the establishment.  It may be tuberoses or garlic, mould or varnish, whitewash, gas, lamp-smoke, or new carpets, a definite and describable or an indefinite and indescribable fragrance, but it is sure to be something besides pure fresh air.

[Illustration:  SHINGLING.]

Let me give you first a suggestion for summer ventilation.  Did you ever shingle the south side of a barn on a calm, hot, sunny day in July, thermometer at ninety degrees in the shade?  Did you ever lay your hand on a black slate or tin roof exposed to the direct rays of a midsummer sun?  Have you ever, at the close of some hot, labor-spent day in August, sat out of doors until the evening air became deliciously cool, and then climbed to your attic dormitory, there to spend a sleepless night in perspiration and despair, anathematizing the man who built and the fate which compelled you to occupy such a chamber of torment?