space once thus occupied is almost a clear gain if made into finished
apartments,--an economy that will commonly allow a family room on the
next floor, whereby the going up and down stairs is no more serious
than if both are one story higher. The sketch is an illustration of
what the basement adds. The capacity of the little house is more than
doubled by it, while in point of style the augmentation is even
greater than in room.

[Illustration: WHAT THE BASEMENT ADDS.]

As to height of stories, you are quite as liable to make them too
high as too low. For rooms within the common limits of size, ten to
eleven feet in the clear is enough. Even nine is by no means
dangerous. If too high for their area, they seem like large closets,
giving a feeling of being walled in, hardly less unpleasant than the
low-hanging ceilings of the last century. I know the argument of
better ventilation. But that depends. The old, seven-foot rooms, with
their huge fireplaces, big enough to hold a load of wood, ox-team and
all, undoubtedly held purer air than is found in the hermetically
sealed apartments of the present time, whose ceilings are out of
sight.

As you say, a tower is often very imposing. It is not always certain
who feels the imposition most heavily, the man who pays for it or the
man who looks at it. They are not only imposing, but they contain six
or seven stories, one above another, of eight-foot square rooms,
deducting a Jacob's-ladder stairway at one side, whereon people climb
to the topmost room for the sake of looking out in the wrong direction
through a round dormer-window, scratching their heads in the mean time
on the nails that come through the roof! Cupolas too are
lovely,--especially on a barn,--and top off a house in the daintiest
fashion possible; just as, to set forth great things by small, the
"knob" on the sugar-bowl cover finishes the sugar-bowl. Many houses do
appear unfinished without a cupola, and I'm sorry for them, because
when the cupola is built it looks so much like the handle on a big
cover that I half expect some giant to come along and lift it off to
take a peep at the curious animals underneath. For, truly, they are
curious animals, and build some curious nests. I like, as well as you,
to get up above my neighbors now and then, and look down upon them. I
never see a tall chimney or church spire without wishing there was a
spiral staircase around the outside of it, from which to view the
landscape