In short, taking one thing with another, I have never favored sleeping porches. But after listening to friends who either had them or who were so sorry they didn't have them that they were determined we should have a full set of them on our house, we concurred in the consensus of opinion and decided to cast aside old prejudices and to have them at all hazards. I believe in the rule of the majority--of course with a few private reservations from time to time, as for instance, when the majority gets carried away by this bone-dry notion. I recall in particular one friend who was especially emphatic and especially convincing in the details of offering suggestions and advice, and--where he deemed such painful measures necessary--in administering reproof for and correction of our faulty misconceptions of what a house should be. But then he was a Bostonian by birth and a Harvard graduate and had the manner--shall we call it the slightly superior manner?--which so often marks one who may boast these two qualifications. When you meet a well-bred native Bostonian who has been through Harvard it is as though you had met an egg which had enjoyed the unique distinction of having been laid twice and both times successfully. Our friend was distinctly that way. When he had rendered judgment there was no human appeal. It never occurred to us there could be any appeal. So we incorporated sleeping porches and vistas through and sun parlors and a hundred other things--more or less--into the plan. Obeying the wills of stronger natures than ours, we figuratively knocked out walls and then on subsequent and what appeared to be superior counsel figuratively stuck them back in again. We lifted the roof for air and we lowered it for style. We tiled the floors and then untiled them and put down beautiful mental hardwood all over the place. We rejected paneled wainscotings in favor of rough-cast plaster and then abolished the plaster for something in the nature of a smooth finish for our walls. By direction we tacked on an ell here and an annex there. If we had kept all the additions which at one period or another we were quite sure we must keep in order to make our home complete we should have had a house entirely unsuitable for persons of our position in life to reside in, but could have made considerable sums of money by renting it out for national conventions.