The details must submit to the general plan of economy.  There will be no veranda, no porch entrances, no grand staircases.  I’m ashamed to say how steep the stairways are going to be.  The bedrooms will be seven by seven, and one will be even smaller.  A bedroom is only good to sleep in, anyway.  There will be no hallway, thank goodness.  Rooms were made to go through.  Why a separate passage for traffic?

The bath-room will be a trifle larger than the size of the smallest bath-tub—­it won’t require so much work to keep in order.  The kitchen won’t be very much larger, but this will make it easy for the cook.  In place of a drawing-room, there will be a large living-room--fourteen by six.  The walls of this room will be covered with books, and it can serve as library and smoking-room as well.  Then, the floor-space not being occupied, we shall use the room as a dining-room.  Incidentally, such a room not being used after bedtime, the cook and the second boy can sleep in it.  One thing that I am temperamentally opposed to is waste, and why should all this splendid room be wasted at night when we do not occupy it?

My ideas are cramped, you say?—­Oh, I forgot to tell you that this home I am describing is to be a floating home, and that my wife and I are to journey around the world in it for the matter of seven years or more.  I forgot also to state that there will be an engine-room in it for a seventy-horse-power engine, a dynamo, storage batteries, etc.; tanks for water to last long weeks at sea; space for fifteen hundred gallons of gasolene, fire extinguishers, and life-preservers; and a great store-room for food, spare sails, anchors, hawsers, tackles, and a thousand and one other things.

Since I have not yet built my land house, I haven’t got beyond a few general ideas, and in presenting them I feel as cocksure as the unmarried woman who writes the column in the Sunday supplement on how to rear children.  My first idea about a house is that it should be built to live in.  Throughout the house, in all the building of it, this should be the paramount idea.  It must be granted that this idea is lost sight of by countless persons who build houses apparently for every purpose under the sun except to live in them.

Perhaps it is because of the practical life I have lived that I worship utility and have come to believe that utility and beauty should be one, and that there is no utility that need not be beautiful.  What finer beauty than strength—­whether it be airy steel, or massive masonry, or a woman’s hand?  A plain black leather strap is beautiful.  It is all strength and all utility, and it is beautiful.  It efficiently performs work in the world, and it is good to look upon.  Perhaps it is because it is useful that it is beautiful.  I do not know.  I sometimes wonder.