“Now to consider the relative merits of brick and wood, for I see Jack is going to sleep again:  The chief excellence of wood has already been mentioned.  It is cheap, so cheap that any man who can earn a dollar a day and live on fifty cents, may at the end of a year, have a house of his own in which he can live and begin to bring up a family in comfort and safety.  He that builds of bricks may rejoice in the durability and strength of his house, in its security against fire and sudden changes of temperature, in economy of fuel in cold weather, of ice in warm weather, and of paint in all weathers; in the possibility of the highest degree of external beauty, and in the blessed consciousness that his real estate will not deteriorate on his hands or be a worn-out and worthless legacy to his children.”

“You must wear peculiar spectacles if you can discover beauty in a square brick house!”

[Illustration:  THE TOPMOST PEAK.]

“Rectitude, of which a brick is the accepted type, certainly has a beauty of its own.  But if a brick house is not beautiful—­here again the fault is not, dear Jack, in the bricks; but in ourselves, our prejudices and our architects—­other things being equal, it should be more beautiful than a wooden house, because the material employed is more appropriate for its use. (I should like to deliver an oration at this point, for upon this Golden Rule of utility hang all the law and the prophets of architectural beauty, but will defer it to a more fitting occasion.) There is, in truth, no limit to the grace of form, color and decoration possible with burned clay.  As a marble statue is to a wooden image, so, for the outer walls of a building, is clay that has been moulded and baked, to the products of the saw-mill, the planing-mill, lathe and fret-saw.”

“Oh, you mean terra cotta?”

“I mean clay that has been wrought into forms of use and beauty, and prepared by fire to endure almost to the end of time.  It is most commonly found in plain rectangular blocks, but in accordance with the artistic spirit of the age, brains are now mixed with the sordid earth, and lasting beauty glows upon the rich, warm face of the strong brick walls.”—­

“Yea, verily, amen and amen!  Beauty, eloquence and true poetry, bright gleams of prophetic fire, patriotism, piety and the music of the spheres.  I can see them all in my mind’s eye and hear them in my mind’s ear.  Jill, my dear, our house shall be bricks—­excuse me, I mean brains—­and mortar, from turret to foundation stone.  Consider that settled, and if the meeting is unanimous we will now adjourn till to-morrow morning.”