The local tradespeople, as well as the house-agents (generally very broken reeds these last too) should be taken into one’s confidence, and if a specially good house is to be let in a month or two it should be stalked as carefully as one stalks a stag of price, and with as much cunning. Too great eagerness means a large premium, and all the last tenant’s awful fixtures; too little means someone else slipping in before one, and bearing off the coveted prize under one’s very eyes. Much as one likes the idea of a real new, clean house, where no one has ever died, or had scarlet fever, small-pox, or diphtheria, and where virgin walls and untouched rooms leave one a free hand as regards decoration and furniture, it is better, if possible, to take some place out of which a ‘good family’ has been obliged to move for some true and reasonable cause, such as a loss or increase of income, or an increase in the requirements of the family. If a new house is chosen, it is absolutely necessary that some honest and tried sanitary authority should be called in from a distance: a local man cannot possibly give an unbiassed opinion; and he should thoroughly examine the system of drains; all pipes should be disconnected from the soil-pipes, and all sanitary arrangements should be placed on the outside of the house. I do not mean apart from the house itself, but built on at one side, so that drainage is simplified immensely and reduced to one area. One where the soil-pipe can be thoroughly ventilated and easily got at should it be necessary to examine the drains, to repair them, or to discover that they are all in good and working order. They should also be capable of being constantly and copiously flushed with a good stream of water, while all pipes connected with the water supply should be protected from the weather, and also easily reached, else will they burst at the least provocation, and cause frost and cold to be doubly cursed, because of their untoward action upon one’s domestic arrangements. If the house has been lived in, confidential relations should be established with the outgoing tenant unless he has any interest in getting the house off his hands; in that case human nature being weak, one can but recollect he wants to part with it. But if he have ended his lease and be genuinely anxious to remain yet cannot for a reasonable cause, it were well to ask him frankly about the wants, requirements, and moods of the special abode, for houses want humouring just as do human beings, and very often one only finds out the virtues when the vices have caused one to throw up the sponge, and once more set out on our nomadic passing through this life.