the day. Almost the first things a housemistress should ascertain about her house are the position and number of the pipes which are part and parcel of the water supply, as, unless this is ascertained, and she is able to possess herself of a species of sketch-map of them, she will not be able to know how to manage should the usual winter arrive in all its strength, and the water become frozen in the pipes in a manner that should never, for one moment even, be allowed. As a rule, our winters are not very long or very severe; if they were we should, no doubt, be readier for them than we are now. But we can always depend on a cold ‘snap’ or period during which our very unpreparedness lays us open to a thousand and one discomforts and dangers, none of which need have been ours if we had had the common sense to recollect that we should have looked out for and prepared against a state of things that is as inevitable as it is undoubtedly most detestable and disagreeable. The suburban builder, as a rule, has his ideas, and his only, on the subject of pipe laying. One idea is, so to imbed them in the walls of the house that we cannot get at them at all, and another is to place them outside the house in the most exposed position possible, where they are warranted to freeze on the first provocation, unless we can take the matter into our own hands at once, and either box them in, filling in the space between the pipes and the boxes with sawdust, which generally protects them for all time from the severest frost; or, at the approach of winter, so swathe them in flannel rags and hay bands, that frost cannot touch them, not forgetting to treat in a similar manner the pipes in the tank room. These should be our especial care, for they are often the first to freeze, and are the cause of many and many a detestable and untoward catastrophe.