An honest house tells the truth about itself.  There is a house here in Glen Ellen.  It stands on a corner.  It is built of beautiful red stone.  Yet it is not beautiful.  On three sides the stone is joined and pointed.  The fourth side is the rear.  It faces the back yard.  The stone is not pointed.  It is all a smudge of dirty mortar, with here and there bricks worked in when the stone gave out.  The house is not what it seems.  It is a lie.  All three of the walls spend their time lying about the fourth wall.  They keep shouting out that the fourth wall is as beautiful as they.  If I lived long in that house I should not be responsible for my morals.  The house is like a man in purple and fine linen, who hasn’t had a bath for a month.  If I lived long in that house I should become a dandy and cut out bathing—­for the same reason, I suppose, that an African is black and that an Eskimo eats whale-blubber.  I shall not build a house like that house.

Last year I started to build a barn.  A man who was a liar undertook to do the stonework and concrete work for me.  He could not tell the truth to my face; he could not tell the truth in his work.  I was building for posterity.  The concrete foundations were four feet wide and sunk three and one-half feet into the earth.  The stone walls were two feet thick and nine feet high.  Upon them were to rest the great beams that were to carry all the weight of hay and the forty tons of the roof.  The man who was a liar made beautiful stone walls.  I used to stand alongside of them and love them.  I caressed their massive strength with my hands.  I thought about them in bed, before I went to sheep.  And they were lies.

Came the earthquake.  Fortunately the rest of the building of the barn had been postponed.  The beautiful stone walls cracked in all directions.  I started, to repair, and discovered the whole enormous lie.  The walls were shells.  On each face were beautiful, massive stones—­on edge.  The inside was hollow.  This hollow in some places was filled with clay and loose gravel.  In other places it was filled with air and emptiness, with here and there a piece of kindling-wood or dry-goods box, to aid in the making of the shell.  The walls were lies.  They were beautiful, but they were not useful.  Construction and decoration had been divorced.  The walls were all decoration.  They hadn’t any construction in them.  “As God lets Satan live,” I let that lying man live, but—­I have built new walls from the foundation up.

And now to my own house beautiful, which I shall build some seven or ten years from now.  I have a few general ideas about it.  It must be honest in construction, material, and appearance.  If any feature of it, despite my efforts, shall tell lies, I shall remove that feature.  Utility and beauty must be indissolubly wedded.  Construction and decoration must be one.  If the particular details keep true to these general ideas, all will be well.