I don’t know how it is, but I can put a room straight in five minutes when another person merely grumbles and declares that nothing can be done; and in a pious rage I set to work and very soon had made a considerable alteration in the place. Although, of course, much could not be accomplished until I sent for my factotum Joe, and had the door moved to the other side, that elegant plaster in the ceiling dislodged, and the hideous tiles in the grate renovated. Then I had a good thick _portière_ placed inside the door, hung the pictures properly, arranged the books and china, put the curtains where they were required in the bookcase, altered the window-curtains, put the desk on one side, not in the very centre of the window, and imported a couple of deep, good basket-chairs from Heelas, of Reading, and some smaller Liberty chairs and tables. The centre table was put on one side, and not in the middle of the room, with magazines and newspapers; and after that I put down proper and suitable rugs, instead of the big one,--beautiful in itself and in its proper place which was a passage--but ridiculous in the middle of a matted floor, where it resembled nothing so much as a garden walk. Since then the room has been more used than any other sitting-room in the house, and is now pronounced one of the most comfortable in the dreary little place, or, I should say, in what was a dreary little place until it was taken vigorously in hand. Albeit, nothing can make the house a real success, because it is built east and west, and with all the windows to the west and to the north and south: these, by the way, raking the back yards of the neighbours fore and aft: while, except for the bath-room window, there is not one which looks towards the east, where, of course, one gets the pleasantest view and the morning sun: a great consideration in a house which is literally a summer house, and where therefore, the western sun is useless and tormenting. Even in the winter an afternoon sun is no earthly use, for by the time it comes round to the western windows it has to retire ignominiously into a bank of fog or cloud; therefore such a house as this especial one should never be taken unless the owner will close the north and north-west windows, and open out big square bows on the south and south-eastern aspect in the manner the windows should have been placed when the house was built. It is always a pleasing reflection to me that the man who designed this house is dead, and cannot now make any other person as miserable by his awkward vagaries as he has made me. If he had simply consented to one or two alterations, and had given us decent grates, and proper servants’ accommodation, the house wouldn’t have been ‘half bad,’ and I do not suppose would have cost a farthing more to build than it cost at first. The cornices were so terrible that they had in some cases to be cut away and reduced to one-fourth, while the elaborate and