tting pencil and
paper, she was soon engaged in sketching the ground-floor of a cottage
house. It was to cost about twenty-six hundred dollars. This was
years before the day of high prices, when a very cozy house could be
compassed for twenty-six hundred.

The following three weeks were very busy weeks for Susan, though all
she did was to work at the plan of her house. Her mother grumbled.
Brother Tom made his jokes, and Gertrude "feazed," to use her own
word. The neighbors came and went, and still Susan continued to
sit with drawing-tools at her desk, sketching plan after plan, and
rejecting one after another.

"I declare, Susie," said her sister, "I don't believe Christopher Wren
gave as much thought to the planning of St. Paul's as you have to that
cottage you're going to build. I believe in my heart you've made a
thousand diagrams."

"Well," Susan retorted, "I don't suppose anybody's been hurt by them."

"You wouldn't say that if you had to clear up the library every
morning as I have to. Those sketches of yours are everywhere, lying
around loose. I have picked them up and picked them up, till they've
tired me out. 'Parlor, dining-room, kitchen, pantry:' I've read this
and read it, till it runs in my head all day, like 'rich man, poor
man, beggar-man, thief.' I've marked off the figures on all the
papering in this house into 'parlor, dining-room, kitchen, pantry."

"I don't see a mite of reason in Susan's being so particular about
that house," said the mother, "seein' she's going to rent it. Now, if
she was going to live in it herself, or any of the rest of the
family, it would be different, Anyway, these plans all look to me like
first-rate ones," she continued, glancing from one to another of half
a dozen under her spectacles--"plenty good enough for renting-houses.
Now, this one is right pretty, 'pears to me, and right handy.--What's
the reason this one won't do, Susan?"

"Why, mother, don't you see the fault?" Susan replied. "There's no way
of getting to the dining-room except through the kitchen."

"To be sure!" said the mother. "Of course that would never do, for,
of all things, I do despise to have folks stalking through my kitchen
when the pots and kittles are all in a muss, as they're always like to
be at meal-times. What ever did you draw it this way for, Susan?"

"Well, I didn't see how it was coming out till it was finished."

"To be sure! Well, now, what's the matter with this one?" and the
m