odern times; but the idea of a constant supply of fresh water
by the simple turning of a stop-cock has not yet visited the great body
of our houses. Were we free to build "our house" just as we wish it,
there should be a bath-room to every two or three inmates, and the hot
and cold water should circulate to every chamber.

Among our _must-bes_, we would lay by a generous sum for plumbing. Let
us have our bath-rooms, and our arrangements for cleanliness and health
in kitchen and pantry; and afterwards let the quality of our lumber and
the style of our finishings be according to the sum we have left. The
power to command a warm bath in a house at any hour of day or night is
better in bringing up a family of children than any amount of ready
medicine. In three-quarters of childish ailments the warm bath is an
almost immediate remedy. Bad colds, incipient fevers, rheumatisms,
convulsions, neuralgias innumerable, are washed off in their first
beginnings, and run down the lead pipes into oblivion. Have, then, O
friend, all the water in your house that you can afford, and enlarge
your ideas of the worth of it, that you _may_ afford a great deal. A
bathing-room is nothing to you that requires an hour of lifting and
fire-making to prepare it for use. The apparatus is too cumbrous,--you
do not turn to it. But when your chamber opens upon a neat, quiet little
nook, and you have only to turn your stop-cocks and all is ready, your
remedy is at hand,--you use it constantly. You are waked in the night by
a scream, and find little Tom sitting up, wild with burning fever. In
three minutes he is in the bath, quieted and comfortable; you get him
back, cooled and tranquil, to his little crib, and in the morning he
wakes as if nothing had happened.

Why should not so invaluable and simple a remedy for disease, such a
preservative of health, such a comfort, such a stimulus, be considered
as much a matter-of-course in a house as a kitchen-chimney? At least
there should be one bath-room always in order, so arranged that all the
family can have access to it, if one cannot afford the luxury of many.

A house in which water is universally and skilfully distributed is so
much easier to take care of as almost to verify the saying of a friend,
that his house was so contrived that it did its own work: one had better
do without carpets on the floors, without stuffed sofas and
rocking-chairs, and secure this.

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