abolish the dining-room. It would
also interfere with the parlor.

I have learned recently that the correspondent who came here to write up
this matter visited the town while I was in the South, and as he could
not find me he was at the mercy of strangers. A young man who lives here
and who is just in the heyday of life, gleefully consented to show the
correspondent my new residence not yet completed. So they went over and
examined the new Oliver Wendell Holmes Hospital, which will be completed
in June and which is, of course, a handsome structure, but quite
different from my house in many particulars.

For instance, my residence is of a different school of architecture,
being rather on the Scandinavian order, while the foregoing has a
tendency toward the Ironic. The hospital belongs to a very recent
school, as I may say, while my residence, in its architectural methods
and conception, goes back to the time of the mound builders, a time when
a Gothic hole in the ground was considered the _magnum bonum_ and the
scrumptuous thing in art. If the reader will go around behind the above
building and notice it carefully on the east side, he will not discover
a dried coonskin nailed to the rear breadths of the wood-shed. That
alone ought to convince an observing man that the house is not mine. The
coonskin regardant will always be found emblazoned on my arms, together
with a blue Goddess of Liberty and my name in green India ink.

[Illustration]

Above I give a rough sketch of my house. Of course I have idealized it
somewhat, but only in order to catch the eye of the keenly observant
reader. The front part of the house runs back to the time of Polypus the
First, while the L, which does not show in the drawing, runs back as far
as the cistern.

In closing, let me say that I am not finding fault with any one because
the above error has crept into the public prints, for it is really a
pardonable error, after all. Neither do I wish to be considered as
striving to eliminate my name from the columns of the press, for no one
could be more tickled than I am over a friendly notice of my arrival in
town or a timely reference to my courteous bearing and youthful
appearance, but I want to see the Oliver Wendell Holmes Hospital
succeed, and so I come out in this way over my own signature and admit
that the building does not belong to me and that, so far as I am
concerned, the man who files a lien on it will simply fritter away his
tim