There are two things belonging to modern civilization,” the architect began, “that fill me with amazement.  This morning, at the usual hour, I sat at my own breakfast table.  During the day I have been reading and writing, eating, drinking and making merry with pleasant acquaintances, old and new.  I have observed the architecture of a dozen cities and a hundred villages and have seen landscapes without number.  I have been occupying an elegantly finished and furnished drawing-room all the time, with every possible comfort and convenience at hand, and now am sitting at your fireside, two hundred and fifty miles from home.  I have just assured the girl I left behind me of my safe arrival, and have listened to her grateful reply.  With my ten thousand companions going in the same direction I have met ten thousand others crossing and recrossing our path, every one of whom was as safe and comfortable as ourselves, every one of whom knew the hour and the minute at which he would reach his destination.  To an observer above the clouds our pathways would appear more frail than the finest gossamer; and the most daring engineer that ever lived, seeing for the first time our mode of travel, would stake his reputation that we were rushing to inevitable destruction.  Yet every foot of our way has been so guarded that not one of these swiftly-moving palaces has swerved from its track or been hindered on its course.  This annihilation of space, with the human skill, vigilance and fidelity incidental to it, are more wonderful to me than any tales of magic, stranger than any fiction.  I believe because I see; nevertheless it is incredible.  My second amazement is that fire insurance companies should continue to live and thrive against such apparently fearful odds, for I see whole villages and cities composed of buildings that seem expressly designed to invite speedy combustion, and at the same time to resist all attempts to extinguish a fire once started in their complex interiors.  Indeed, the most effective modes of treatment yet discovered for a burning building are drowning it with all its contents in a deluge of water or blowing it up with gunpowder.  It is an open question which of the two methods is to be preferred.

[Illustration:  A SECURE OUTLOOK.]

“Let me show you how a wooden house is built.  The sills and joists of the first floor are comparatively safe, because they are not boxed in with dry boards, and even with furnace and ash-pits in the cellar there would be little danger from a fire down below if it were not for the careful provision made for carrying it into the upper part of the structure.  This provision, however, is most effectively made by means of the upright studs and furrings that stand all around the outside of the building and reach across it wherever a partition is needed.  Accordingly, every wooden house has from one hundred to one thousand wooden flues of a highly inflammable character arranged expressly