beauty and comfort when they see it, get bewildered by quantities; and unable to select between them cannot secure loveliness, and are equally unable somehow to recognise how comfort can be obtained. ‘How do you keep this room up to 60 degrees?’ once said a doctor to me, when I was inhabiting, _pro tem._, a so-called furnished house in the depth of the winter. ‘I had a child dying here of bronchitis last winter, and, try how they would, his people couldn’t raise the temperature to above 50 degrees, although his life depended on it.’ ‘Ah,’ said I, ‘they doubtless left it as they found it. I didn’t. I have covered the gaping stained "surround" with felt. I have hung curtains inside and outside the rickety door and instead of feeble wisps of muslin to the windows I have four good thick curtains besides long thin ones. That’s all the secret; and I never burn gas as you see, while my fires last twice as long as they did before the alterations.’ ‘Oh, I wish I had known all that before,’ said the doctor, ‘for neither I nor the parents could find out the cause of the cold.’ A little thing which will illustrate better than any amount of further description what I mean by saying that people don’t always know how to obtain comfort though they can appreciate it when found. CHAPTER II HALLS AND PASSAGES If we wish to make a complete conquest of the special suburban residence we are about to circumvent, there is no doubt whatever that the first battle of all has to be fought and won on the very doorstep. Nay sometimes one has to commence the conflict before we reach as far as that, for have we not the ‘carriage sweep’ to tackle and the slamming gate to minister to before reaching the front door? If we are cursed with the ‘approach,’ all we can do is to make the gate as inoffensive as we can, for alas! we must keep it or we shall have our front garden a gathering ground for all the curs in the neighbourhood. But we must e’en remove the latch altogether, and line the place where it was with indiarubber, and put a couple of stout indiarubber springs on the house side of the gate, which should have an inner lining of wire-netting, and a head-trimming of barbed wire, or else of rough nails, to prevent the demon boy seating himself thereon. Then, if by firm refusals to allow tramps to come up, and by never giving them one farthing--or indeed anything save a bread ticket redeemable at the nearest baker’s shop, and which, ten to one, we shall find torn up in our ‘avenue,’--we can induce them to mark our gate with some secret sign, which means we are unspeakable brutes and not good even for a ‘little hot water,’ we shall have ensured ourselves a certain amount of quiet, and shall, at all events, have begun our campaign in the right way. Our gate we should paint some good solid colour, and Indian red is a good shade with green hedges and trees about us, as is also a special shade of dark olive green.