To that end he hunted up the highest-priced architect of whom he could hear and asked to have designs submitted forthwith. The highest-priced architect readily undertook the reconstruction of the Lathrop and Clegg domiciles, but being too occupied to go down into the country and look over the field personally, he delegated one of his youngest and most promising assistants to accomplish the task, and the young and promising assistant forthwith packed his dress-suit case and set off. He was an assistant of most extraordinary youth and almost unbelievable promise, and he saw a chance to plan colleges (endowed by J. Lathrop, Esq.), palaces (to be built for Lathrop, the millionaire), possibly to be commissioned with the overseeing of the artistic development of some new, up-springing city (Lathropville, Alaska, or something of that sort), if he should only succeed in at once accomplishing a close union of feeling with the golden offspring of our old friend. His first really rich client is to a young débutant in bricks just what a well-hung picture is to the budding artist, or a song before royalty is to a singer. Such being the well-known facts of life the young and promising assistant fully intended to do himself proud in the reconstruction of the two houses consigned by Jathrop's benevolence to his tender mercies. The young architect came to town and went to the hotel (at Jathrop's expense). He spent the next ten days in going twice each day to study his task, sketch its realities and idealities, and also make the acquaintance of Mrs. Lathrop and Susan Clegg, for he was a young man of new and novel ideas, and one of his newest and most novel ideas was to build a house which would really suit those who were to live in it. He was so young that he had no conception as to how this was to be done, nor the faintest inkling as to what a Titanic-crossed-with-Promethean undertaking it would be to do, if even he did know how; but he felt--and most truly--that it was a new view of the relation between house and builder, and he felt proud over having thought it out for himself as well as for all time to come. Then he had another novel idea--not so altogether his own, however--which was that a house should "express its dweller." This latter idea was quite beyond the grasp of his present audience and just a little beyond his own grasp, too, but he was brave and conscientious and didn't see it that way at all. It has taken some time to lay out all these premises, but if there is any one with whom one can desire close acquaintance it is surely the man who comes to build over a comfortable and in-most-ways-satisfactory home of long years' standing, so I trust that the minutes have not been altogether wasted. Mrs. Lathrop and Miss Clegg received the young man and his mission in such states of mind as were entirely compatible with their individual outlook over life.