“Don't tell me what the architect has promised!” I said bitterly. “Next to waiters, architects are the most optimistic creatures on earth. A waiter is always morally certain that twenty minutes is the extreme limit of time that will be required to cook anything. You think that you would like, say, to have a fish that is not listed on the bill of fare under the subheading 'Ready Dishes'--it may be a whale or it may be a minnow: that detail makes no difference to him--and you ask the waiter how about it, and he is absolutely certain that it will be possible to borrow a fishing pole somewhere and dig bait and send out and catch that fish and bring it back in and clean it and take the scales and the fins off and garnish it with sprigs of parsley and potatoes and lemon and make some drawn butter sauce to pour over it and bring it to you in twenty minutes. If he didn't think so he would not be a waiter. An architect is exactly like a waiter, except that he thinks in terms of days instead of terms of minutes. Don't tell me about architects! I only wish I were as sure of heaven as the average architect is regarding that which no mortal possibly can be sure of, labor conditions being what chronically they are.” But conceded that the reader is but a humble husbandman--meaning by that a man who is married--he doubtless has already figured out the result of this debate. Himself, he knows how such debates usually do terminate. In the end I surrendered, and the final upshot was that we set about the task of furnishing the rooms that were to be. From that hour dated the beginning of my wider and fuller education into the system commonly in vogue these times in or near the larger cities along our Atlantic seaboard for the furnishing of homes. I have learned though. It has cost me a good deal of time and some money and my nervous system is not what it was, having suffered a series of abrupt shocks, but I have learned. I know something now--not much, but a little--about period furniture. A period, as you may recall, is equal to a full stop; in fact a period is a full stop. This is a rule in punctuation which applies in other departments of life, as I have discovered. Go in extensively for the period stuff in your interior equipments and presently you will be coming to a full stop in your funds on hand. The thing works out the same way every time. I care not how voluminously large and plethoric your cash balance may be, period furniture carried to an excess will convert it into a recent site and then the bank will be sending you one of those little printed notices politely intimating that “your account appears overdrawn.” And any time a banker goes so far as to hint that your account appears overdrawn you may bet the last cent you haven't left that he is correct. He knows darned good and well it is overdrawn and this merely is his kindly way of softening the blow to you.