I will now proceed to say a few words on your servants' offices, and of these the _housekeeper's room_ generally ranks first. As I see no store-closet marked in your plan, I suppose you will make the housekeeper's room serve for that purpose; particularly as you say you mean to be your own housekeeper; and you will find the store-closet a most important place in the country, as it is necessary to lay in larger stores of all the common articles of daily consumption than are ever required in a town, where shops can be sent to on any emergency. Your housekeeper's room should therefore have ranges of cupboards and drawers all round it, to contain the household linen, china, glass, pickles, preserves, cakes, tea, coffee, sugar, and in short every article wanted by the family, a store of which is kept. There should be a bureau, or desk with drawers beneath, to keep the account-books, receipts for bills, and other papers relating to housekeeping; and on one side of the fireplace you may have a cupboard with iron doors enclosing a small oven, and a range of charcoal stoves, for making any dishes in French cookery, or any cakes or preserves that you may take a fancy to do yourself, with the assistance of your maid, apart from the observation of the other servants. On the other side of the fireplace may be a similar cupboard, containing a small sink with a wash-hand basin furnished with a plug and waste-pipe to let off the water, and two pipes, one to supply cold water from a cistern, and the other hot water from a boiler behind the fireplace. Before fixing up the cupboards the walls should be made perfectly dry, and, if they are not so, they should be battened, that is, covered with canvass strained over slips of wood nailed to the walls, strong brown paper being afterwards pasted over the canvass. This preserves a stratum of air between the walls and the backs of the cupboards, which effectually excludes damp. You may easily know when a room is damp by its appearance, before you have kept any thing in it. If the walls have been whitewashed, they will show various-coloured stains; and, if they have been papered, the paper will hang loose. No expense should be spared to make a room dry, that is to be used for keeping stores in, as the mischief done by damp is incalculable. Lump sugar crumbles into powder; moist sugar hardens into lumps; saltpetre and bay salt turn to water; preserves become mouldy or candied, cakes soft, and linen mildewed. Nor is the mischief done by damp confined to any one part of the house. In the butler's pantry the silver will become spotted; in the cellar the wine will lose its strength and flavour; and, in the living-rooms, the oil paintings will become blistered, and the books and engravings stained.