“Yes; and whatever the number of rooms, they should be large enough, not merely to hold the occupants when the doors are shut, but for comfortable living and moving about.  There is nothing in which all men and women are more conservative than in the planning of their houses; there seems to be something hereditary about it, as difficult to change as a tendency to bald heads and awkward locomotion.  Americans are special sufferers in this respect.  The primitive Anglo-American home was only a step removed from the wigwams of the aboriginal savages, in size, shape and general accommodations.  Even our English ancestors, from whom we derived some of our domestic notions, were not accustomed to anything magnificent in the way of dwellings.  The climate was against them, and they were not sufficiently luxurious in their tastes.  Their houses were primarily places for shelter and refuge.  In summer they lived out of doors, and in winter they crept into close quarters and waited for warm weather.  With plenty of land and building materials to be had for the taking, our colonial grandfathers should have had the most generous homes in the world.”

“Yes; and to judge by some of the old colonial mansions which have escaped the ‘making-over’ vandals we have been going backwards in that respect during the last fifty or a hundred years.”

“Yes; and we ought to have been going the other way, for the size of rooms should increase as the cost of furniture diminishes.  Take for instance, a parlor or sitting room fifteen feet square, which is, I believe, about the orthodox size for a modern house.  Give such a room a dozen straight-backed and straight-legged chairs ranged along the sides, a table in the center of the room with a green cover and four books on it, two or three unhappy-looking family portraits on the walls, a pair of brass candlesticks on the high, wooden mantel, a pair of bellows, a shovel and tongs, with, perhaps, in the way of luxury, a haircloth sofa.  Now compare the room furnished in that way, which was by no means uncommon in the days of our grandfathers with a room of the same size, in which are stored half a dozen chairs, no two alike, and some of them as large as small lounges, a center table piled with books and magazines and photographs, till like a heap of jack straws, it is impossible to remove one without disturbing the whole pile; a lounge with a back, a divan or something without a back, an upright piano, two or three bookcases, several small stools and piles of Turkish cushions to catch the unwary, huge Japanese vases beside the fireplace, a leopard skin with a solid head in front of the table, and a sprinkling of Persian rugs spilt over the floor; a cabinet of bric-a-brac in the northeast corner, a ‘whatnot’ with a big jardiniere bearing a three-foot palm on the top story in the northwest, a carved bracket with a sheaf of Florida grasses in the southeast, and a tall wooden clock that won’t go in the southwest; a brass tea kettle hanging from