ting by our experience. We would go at once, and among other
things we would go farther up town. So far down was too noisy, besides
the air was not good for the Precious Ones.

It was coming on spring, too, and it would be pleasanter farther up.
Not so far as we had been before, but far enough to be out of the whirl
and clatter and jangle. It was possible, we believed, to strike the
happy medium, and this we regarded somewhat in the light of another
discovery.

Life now began to assume a new interest. In the few remaining days of
our stay in the boarding-house we grew tolerant and even fond of our
fellow-boarders, and admitted that an endless succession of Tuesday
stews and Wednesday hashes would make us even as they. We went so far as
to sympathize heartily with the landlady, who wept and embraced the
Little Woman when we went, and gave the Precious Ones some indigestible
candy.

We set forth then, happy in the belief that we had mastered, at last,
the problem of metropolitan living. We had tried boarding for a change,
and as such it had been a success, but we were altogether ready to take
up our stored furniture and find lodgment for it, some place, any place,
where the bill of fare was not wholly deductive, where our rooms would
not be made a confessional and a scandal bureau, and where we could, in
some measure, at least, feel that we had a "home, sweet home."

VI.

_Pursuing the Ideal._

I suppose it was our eagerness for a home that made us so easy to
please.

Looking back now after a period of years on the apartment we selected
for our ideal nest I am at a loss to recall our reasons for doing so.
Innocent though we were, it does not seem to me that we could have found
in the brief time devoted to the search so poor a street, so wretched a
place, and so disreputable a janitor (this time a man). I only wish to
recall that the place was damp and small, with the kitchen in front;
that some people across the air shaft were wont to raise Cain all night
long; that the two men below us frequently attempted to murder each
other at unseemly hours, and that some extra matting and furniture
stored in the basement were stolen, I suspect, by the janitor himself.

Once more we folded our tents, such of them as we had left, and went far
up town--very far, this time. We said that if we had to live up town at
all we would go far enough to get a whiff of air from fresh fields.

There was spring in the air when we