In life, as in everything else, it is extremely difficult to draw the line anywhere. I want both my young people to care about their house, and know every detail of its management, but they must not become domestic dummies, and think of nothing save how to make a shilling do the work of two, and how to circumvent that terrible butcher, or that still more awful laundry-woman. Once started, the details that seem so ugly and wearisome on paper need never be gone into again, but it is necessary to have some plan and stick to it, else the jarring of the wheels of the domestic car will always be heard, and life will indeed be stale, dull, and unprofitable. People provide their own poetry, my young friends, and life is a very good thing if you do not expect too much from it, or if you will not refuse to accept other folks’ experience, for she has nothing new to give you, nothing to show you she has not shown us all before you. You are not the only young people who have started on a diet of roses and cream, and not the only ones either who have found this disagree with them. So buckle too manfully, and work your way onwards, being quite sure that every fresh home started and kept going on excellent sound principles of health and beauty does a work little known of, less understood about, perhaps, by those who inhabit it, but none the less beneficial to all those who come within its influence. But I do not mean to preach a sermon, much as I should like to do so, but only to preface my remarks on the subject of our first shopping and how we should begin our scheme of decoration. It is usual for the landlord to allow a certain sum for the decoration of a house; but rarely, if ever, does that sum allow of anything like really artistic papering and painting. Yet, I maintain, artistic surroundings are far more important than handsome furniture or even an elaborate wedding dress; and I think if we have common sense, and find a good journeyman carpenter and painter, who will work himself with his men under our directions, we shall manage very well indeed. Could we afford it, of course, I would employ Morris, or Smee’s people, or Collinson and Lock, with their delicious arrangement of ‘fittings’; but we cannot, and our first business is to find some inexpensive man who will do as he is told. Then we can buy our papers and set to work. There is no saving like that we can make in this first work, if we can only put our hand on our man. And when this is done our next step is to describe the work we shall require to be done and to ask him to send in a contract, which is to be for everything, and is not to be departed from on any account whatever.