THE LESSON OF THE ICE-HOUSE.

MRS. JOHN: Dear Madam,-Without doubt the affair is getting serious, but do not
give yourself any uneasiness as to the issue. The Divinity that shapes our matrimonial
ends is, happily, a wiser power than that which designs our houses, however it may
appear to outsiders. Your friend talks like a gentleman and a scholar. I admonished him
discreetly, promised to study his interesting problem and give him a chapter on
ventilation; which, by the way, is so intimately connected with warming, that I may be
obliged to make a sort of company letter in answering your husband's inquiry on that
subject. Tell him, in brief, to use fireplaces if he has a hundred acres of wood-land to
clear up; stoves, if he can live without air; grates, if he doesn't mind the trouble and the
ashes; furnace, if he can set it directly under each room and can find one that won't
strangle him some windy night with poison gases; and steam or hot water, if he can run a
machine-shop and keep a competent engineer. Solar heat may be more available than he
thinks, but his doubt as to the last-named mode proves that he has no experimental
knowledge of it. Neither have I.
Tell him also to protect his family as carefully as he protects his ice, and the house-
warming will be a simple matter. The conditions are identical, only turned inside out. In
one case the heat is to be kept from penetrating, in the other from escaping, and both
require the same treatment; not, perhaps, to the extent of stuffing with sawdust,-
confined air is just as good,-but the walls and the floors, the roofs and the windows,
should be made to prevent the escape of heat. He may think I underrate his scientific
attainments, but it will do no harm to remind him that an air-tight house may be a very
cold one. A man would freeze to death in a glass bottle, when a coarse, porous blanket
would keep him comfortable. Double windows are not to keep cold air out, but to keep
the heat in. India-rubber weather-strips have, doubtless, caused ten times as many
influenzas as they have prevented. More heat will radiate through a window of single
glass than would be carried out by the air through a crack, half an inch wide, at the side of
it.
These suggestions are "just to set him a thinking."




LETTER XXXVII.
From John.