"Draw a plan of it," said Marjorie, turning up the planed side of a hoard. So I sat down and drew a plan, while the girls watched over my shoulders with as much intentness as though I were an architect designing a palace. "The house will be one storey," I explained, "and long, and narrow, because that is the simplest as well as the cheapest way to build it, and we are to be our own carpenters. The walls will be of shiplap, covered with matched siding, with tarpaper between. The roof will be of two thicknesses of boards, bent to a gentle oval over a stout ridge-pole, and again with tarpaper between. You have no idea how much the West owes to tarpaper. Wherever the new settler goes, goes tarpaper. I would almost say," I continued, warming up to my subject, "that if a flag is ever needed for these western prairies it should be a banner of tarpaper, nailed between two laths. 'O say, does the tarpaper banner still wave?'--you see, it has possibilities." "But isn't it awfully smelly stuff?" said Jean, who had a strain of delicacy in her that at times conflicted with her surroundings. "Ah, that is one of its chief virtues. You may not know yet, but you will learn--at least, so Jake assured me--that population is not nearly so scarce on the prairies as it seems. He says that the inmates of one of these little bachelor shacks in many cases number literally millions. Millions. Well--they don't like tarpaper. Blessed be tarpaper! "The house is to be fourteen feet wide, so that sixteen-foot boards will bend just the right length for the roof. The main room--which is to be all the rooms you mentioned, Jean, and the kitchen as well--will be in the centre of the building. It will be fourteen feet square--like that. At the south end of the building, where the sun will shine in spring and flowers will grow up the wall, will be a room eight by fourteen--Marjorie's. At the north end, where the winter winds will hit us first, will be a room eight by fourteen--Frank's. That's all." "And the windows?" said Marjorie. "A window in the south for you, a window in the north for me, a window in the west for the living-room, and a door in the east for us all." "How simple--and delightful!" Jean trilled. "And is Jack's house--our house--to be the same?" "That is the intention. Of course, these plans are subject to approval or rejection by the feminine vote, but Jack and I talked it over with Jake, and we figured this was the best we could afford, and the most we could get for the money." Marjorie seemed to be studying deeply. "Then your window will look across the valley into Jean's," she said suddenly.