LETTER XLI.
Reading edition
From John.
ETERNAL VIGILANCE.
MY DEAR ARCHITECT: You did well to send the key to your puzzles, else I might have frozen to death before finding out how to keep warm. But you've earned your discharge, which I forward herewith. Now I'm going to send you some grains of wisdom, gathered during my experience in building, which you may distribute at your discretion among your clients. When a man—I don't care if it's Solomon himself—undertakes to build a house, tell him from me, to wind up all other earthly affairs before beginning; wind them up
The openings in the basement wall somehow get out of place, an inch or two too high or too low, or at one side, then the windows over them will look askew. The air-spaces in the wall will be filled up where they ought not to be, or left out where they ought to be filled; then the frost will go through one and the rats the other. If he uses colored mortar,
The war with the masons is short and sharp; that with the carpenters long and tedious. There are ten thousand ways you don't want
The rough work gets covered up pretty quickly, but it pays to keep watch and see that the spikes are put in where they belong; that the back plastering reaches quite up to the plate and down to the sill; that timbers are not left without visible means of support, or hung by "toe-nails" when they ought to be well framed and pinned. It's hard to make a carpenter believe that plas
The gas-man had his work to do over because some of the drop-lights were not in the centre of the ceilings.
I tremble to think of what might have been if I had left the painter to his own devices. It seems very clear to say you'll have the outside painted a sort of a kind of subdued gray, with trimmings a little darker, bordering on a brown; but unless you stand over the paint-tub with a loaded revolver, you'll get anything but what you expect. It may be a great deal better, but it won't be what you wanted. By the way, there's a great responsibility resting on the
I told you my house was half done when it was well begun; now that it is almost done it seems to me only fairly begun.
Yours,
JOHN.