cipatory smells, the odour of which is sufficient to spoil
your appetite for the best dressed dinner in the world. If you would
have any use for the vault under your house, keep all your cellar
stores, and all your "dry goods" there;--it will be a test of your house
being well-built if they do not show any effects of damp after a few
months' stowage below the level of the soil, yet in _aere pleno_. We do
not mean to say that we would put one of our best and newest saddles,
nor our favourite set of harness, in one of the lower vaults, to judge
of the dampness of the house; but depend upon it, a pair or two of old
shoes form excellent hygrometers; and you may detect the "dew-point"
upon them with wonderful accuracy.

"But only look at how you are increasing the cost of the house by thus
stretching out the house, and really wasting the space and
ground!"--What! still harping on the same string--that eternal
purse-string!--still at the gold and the notes? If you go on at this
rate, my good sir, you will never do any thing notable in the
house-line. Take a lesson from Louis XIV. when he built
Versailles;--that sovereign had at least this one good quality,--he had
a supreme contempt for money;--it cost him a great deal no doubt, but it
is "Versailles," _nec pluribus impar_;--why, it is a quarter of a mile
long, and there is, or rather was, room in it to have lodged all the
crowned heads of Europe, courts, ministers, guards, and all. Never stint
yourself for space; the ground you build on is your own; it is only the
extra brick and mortar;--the number of windows is not increased by
stretching the plan out, the internal fittings are not an atom more
expensive. Be at ease for once in your life, and cast about widely for
room.

And now, dear sir, if you can but once remove this prejudice of cost
from your mind, you may set at defiance all those twaddling architects
who come to you with their theories of the "smallest spaces of support,"
and who would fain persuade you that, because it is scientific to build
many rooms with few materials, _therefore_ you ought to dwell in a house
erected on such principles,--and that they ought to build it for you.
You may send them all to the right-about with their one-sided contracted
notions: is the house to be built for _your_ sake or for _theirs_? who
is going to inherit it--you or they? who is to find out all the comforts
and discomforts of the mansion--the owner or the architect?--If _you_