“Chez moi,” says the Frenchman; “Home,” say we. There is a home idea about our home, that the Frenchman knows not of. There is a sanctity about the American home, that the “chez moi” cannot reach. Everybody who can, ought to have a home. Everybody who has a home ought to make it as pleasant, as delightful a home, as his circumstances will admit of. Nobody has a right to have a dismal home, a sour home, a damp home, an illiterate home, or an unventilated home, unless a grim weight of untoward circumstances pressing on him, forbid him. As our society is constituted, our home must be in a house. The house is not the home, for there is many a house which is not a home at all; but it is a part of it. There are some people who will never make themselves at home in any house whatever. Restless groaners, dissatisfied croakers, worrying grumblers, peevish mischief-makers, unreasonable fault-finders, who never were pleased with any of their surroundings, and never will be; on these homeless souls the blessings of a home are thrown away. They see only home sorrows, and know nothing of the home joys. Their only congenial abiding place would be an Asylum for the Indigent Homeless. Perchance some weary creature may, one day, leave in his will a bequest for the founding of such an institution. It should be an immense establishment. Considering how cheap light and air are, it is wonderful how little of these useful elements finds its way into some of our house-homes. If light were to be purchased, at so much a shine; if air could be breathed only at a fixed rate per lung-full; or if either or both of these necessaries to our comfortable existence were taxed by legal enactment, it would seem iniquitous and oppressive. Queer as it may seem, there are houses, erected by builders who would seem never to have drawn a full breath in their lives, so sedulously have they taken pains to close every cranny in their edifices against the circulation of the air which should be freely admitted. Rooms which, when doors and windows are closed, are air-tight; in which the family sit for hours upon a stretch, breathing over and over, hour after hour, the air which has been inhaled, and exhaled, and which, having done its work, should be suffered to find an exit into the street, that it may go about its business and be purified, making way as it goes, for more and more to come in and administer to the comfort and nourishment of the half asphyxiated family. As if it were not enough to exclude the air, we stint ourselves to the most meager quantity of light on which it is possible to grope our way around the premises. The close shutters, the shades, rolling against them the minor and more elaborate curtains of lace or of silken or woolen fabric, repel the intrusion of the sunshine which would fade our carpets and render shabby the varnish on our furniture. The parlor, sacred from the entrance of juvenile foot to tread its costly carpet, for chubby fingers to soil its wonders of carved piano or marvelously decorated etagere; reserved by the family, who cheat themselves out of its use, for the sole use of its guests, who care but little for them, and for whose visits they care as little. With darkened rays of light feebly oozing the apartment scarcely enough for the guests to avoid breaking his bones over articles of furniture, strangely enough distributed with elaborate random over and across the floor, as stumbling-blocks in the path of the wayfarer. With musty odor ascending from the cellar, that dark, damp hole in the ground, dug to furnish the family with miasma enough to last them during their natural lives and perhaps to hurry them off to the grave before their time. Such a house is a constant memento mori. The sepulchral cellar, with its perfume as if of the cemetery, is enough to permeate every thought and action of each member of the household with a damp gloom and a dismal foreboding of coming wretchedness. The rumble in the street of the wheels of a passing cart, is enough to suggest to the inmates the coming of the hearse, to drive them away to a hardly less congenial place. It is not only from the houses of the degraded and intemperate that the absence of air and light is to be mourned; even some of our finest mansions are built with a reckless disregard of the value of these two necessary elements of health and happiness. Pale, nervous, weary mothers, and flabby little children who only half enjoy their lives, are an inevitable consequence of a neglect of duty and privilege in this respect. Make the house a home. Throw open the shutters and let the sunshine fade the carpets rather than blanch your children's faces by its absence. Fling wide open every door and window in the house, at some time during every day in the year, and let the fresh air blow through, even if it makes you so cold that the whole family have to engage in a merry exercise at calisthenics, to keep themselves warm. Purify the damp cellar, and purge the whole house of that funeral air. And let the words of good cheer be on every tongue. Then, with sound minds and loving hearts, in healthy bodies, you may enjoy what everybody ought to have, A REAL HOME.—Sel.