HOUSEBOATING. The of the sum mer-time, as a recreath n, on what really is a flat bottomed raft supporting a more or less extensive and luxurious suite of rooms, occupying the centre of the raft. At each end of is 311 01511 deck, and an open gallery along the sides: the top, which is railed round and covered by an owning, forms nn open court or garden. There are endless varieties in design, but this general description sub,t ant ;ally. covers chat act or • isties of most modern houseboats. This mariner of passing the summer holidays began about I. on the Thames. To-day a hundred house boats are to be found out it, and a regular weekly is published. which gives the whereabouts of every such boat from day to day. Some of these boats are models of beauty in decoration; and fittings, and veritable floating palaces of luxury and fashbm. They are either poled from pi hut to point, or towed from the path by a horse, or else tugged by an auxiliary launch. The prox ii ity of riverside villages and inns precludes the necessity of giving up intleh of the internal space to stores. American conditions are so different as to need a, much greater variety of treatment, and in every section of the country houscboating is Houseboats are abundant on the Pa cific Coast, and the :Mississippi system is dotted with them wherever a great city forms the neces sary sneial nucleus. On the Saint Lawrence and the Likes George and Champlain they are a summer feature, and the neighborhood of New Vork is especially favorable to them. In the Florida waters are some of the largest ever built, as well as many of the humbler and truer kind.
For convenience of description, houseboats may he divided into four (lasses, according as they (1) simply float, and are moored to stay; (2) are meant to move from place to place, but have no power; (3) carry their own sails: or ( 11 are propelled by their own engines. Within
these divisions every kind of craft is in service. There is the .1/amcda, a converted S5-foot schooner, which can cruise by sail or steam. and the ('lima',, a double-decker, 97 feet long, capable f miviTating with her own steam power the inlets and inland waters of Florida. Scarcely less pretentious are the Idler and the Wanderer, designed especially for the shallow rivers of the upper Mississippi Valley. Among sailing house boats there are the Sommerheim, 71\x20, on which a house 3OxIll is carried, and the Nautilus, with a deckhouse constructed of four abandoned street gars. Others are floating studios, like Dragon, :IONIC': and Outing, built for the waters inside the keys of the .Tersey coast, a roomy sloop rigged houseboat 35x1] and 13 inches drang,ht; hunting,-boxes. like the Ptah, with her house sunk level with her deck, for use in duck-shoot ing; and broad-beamed rafts, like the Beiridere, of which half a hundred may be found in San Francisco Bay and its tributaries.
An ordinary tInt-boat. without power, except some simple sails. steered b? a rudder, and earrt' ing house of th.orgia pine. can be built (home made) or purehased where for from $:191) ssuo. Practical working dcsi-lis and instruetions for Imilding mill be found in articles by Norton in lhii it/9 for July iNew York, Isug) and August 1 Nev York, 1900).