Certainly it is unfamiliar environment from which one’s mind naturally reverts to his childhood (you must have had a childhood)--reverts to the wondrous houses we visited in the impressionable days of long ago. Ah, they were a very different kind of houses, were they not?--houses with significance, houses with personality, if building material may ever be said to incorporate that. They had a history to tell. They had legends, too. As we think of them they seem to have been literally covered with legends, some of them cut with the jack-knife deep in the attic timbers. But they were all legends that appeal to happiness. They were not the legends of tombs. And the old sensations come back to us again. Perhaps it is just as the afternoon light begins to fail so that we can no longer read, and the sunset is very beautiful. No, no, the vagaries of geometrical invention will never supplant those first loves! For you, then, when your lamp is lighted--I hope it is not the dazzling, 16-candle-power electric bulb of commercialism, made still further terrifying by a gorgeous glass globe--for you I have a treat in store to soothe the nerves the newly-invented architecture has indescribably rasped. It is a “sure enough” old-fashioned house. To borrow the style of Ik Marvel in his “Reveries of a Bachelor,” I can see how you will carefully put this book where you will not miss it to show your architect in the morning. You will remember the number of the page that you do not waste the time of a busy professional man in finding the place; and this is about what you will say to him: “I do not know how good the architecture is, that PLATE IX. [Illustration: EASTOVER. The Garden Front. A modern development of Annapolitan architecture under the Colonial régime in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Time of George II.] the old house on Benefit Street in Providence represents (Plate VII); but I do know it has just the atmosphere that reaches the inner man, and that is the atmosphere I want.” But not every architect is able to give you this atmosphere (Plate X). None of the architectural schools teach it, and commercialism in some form usually doles out the architect’s bread and butter, so that he is accustomed in his work to reduce your proposition to a cold calculation of so much house for so much money. He is made to _smile grimly_ (with Mr. R. H. Davis’s kind permission) over what he considers your sentimental impracticality, then says: “We build houses by the cubic foot, you know.” And after the size, position, number of rooms, etc., are determined, then, whatsoever art may be applied just as well as not without materially adding to the cost is made to serve as the meek handmaid of commercialism; and I must say of this applied art as we see it every day, exemplified in America, it certainly looks the part.