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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

OFFICE COPY.

No. N. E..

PUBLISHED,

This Volume must not be taken from file.

OUT or TOWN PLACES

BY DON?. G. MITCHELL

OUT-OF-TOWN
PLACES:

WITH

HINTS FOR THEIR IMPROVEMENT

BY THE AUTHOR OP
"WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD"

[A RE-ISSUE OF "RURAL STUDIES"]

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS
1888

COPYRIGHT, 1867,

BY DONALD G. MITCHELL

TttOWS

PRINTING »ND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW VORK.

PREFA TOR Y NO TE.

I HAVE changed the name of this volume, — not with
the view of deceiving anybody, or of putting a new
blazon upon old wares, — but because I wish to express,
so far as I can, in the title, the very practical aim of the
book, and to dispossess the reader at the start of any
notion that it is made up by a mere literary grouping of
ruralities.

In the Preface of 1867 — which was the date of its first
issue — I said, — " Its aim is to stimulate those who live
in the country, or who love the country, to a fuller and
wider range of thinking about the means of making their
homes enjoyable — rather than to lay down any definite
rules by which this may be accomplished ; and I have es-
pecially sought to excite the ambition of those holders of
humble estates, who believe that nothing can be done in
the way of adornment of country property, except under
the eye of accomplished gardeners. The book is a tract

iv PREFATORY NOTE.

for homeliness ; and I hope it may make country prose-
lytes."

I have still faith that the simplicities it teaches, and its
common-sense suggestions, may have good influence —
notwithstanding the great aesthetic gains which have been
made during the last fifteen years, in all that relates to
the equipment of suburban homes : and I am quite sure
that the intelligent and tasteful interpretation of the text
which has been made by the drawings of my friend Mr.
E. C. Gardner, of Springfield, Mass., will give wholly new
force and piquancy to the suggestions I have urged.

D. G. M.

EDGEWOOD, April, 1884.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

7. AN OLD-STYLE FARM, i

//. ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.

POMOLOGISTS AND COMMON PEOPLE, . . 25
LACKLAND MAKES A BEGINNING, . . .35
LACKLAND'S HOUSE-PLANS, .... 44

LACKLAND' s GARDENER, 54

A PIG AND A Cow, 62

ON GATEWAYS, 73

GATEWAYS AND RURAL CARPENTRY, . . 81
VILLAGE AND COUNTRY ROAD-SIDE, . . .88

///. WAY-SIDE HINTS. •

TALK ABOUT PORCHES, 99

ON NOT DOING ALL AT ONCE, .... 109

PLOUGHING AND DRILLED CROPS, . . .117
ROADS AND SHADE, ...... 124

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HEDGING, . . 129

VILLAGE GREENS, 139

RAILWAY GARDENING 147

LANDSCAPE TREATMENT OF RAILWAYS, . .153

vi CONTENTS.

IV. LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS.

LANDSCAPE GARDENING, ..... 163

FARM LANDSCAPE, 168

LANDS NOT FARMED, 174

CITY AND TOWN PARKS, .... 184

PLACE FOR PARKS, 189

EQUIPMENT OF PUBLIC GARDENS, . . . 194

BURYING-GROUNDS, 200

V. MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE.

REAL ESTATE PURCHASE, .... 209
COST AND RETURNS OF FIFTY ACRES, . .214

QUESTION OF LOCALITIES, .... 226

TESTIMONY OF EXPERTS, 231

RESULTS OF INQUIRY, 244

HOUSES AND REPAIRS, 250

SITE AND MATERIAL, 257

FORM AND COLOR, 266

MR. URBAN' s PURCHASE, .... 274

A SUNNY HOUSE, 286

CONCLUSION, 292

I.

AN OLD-STYLE FARM.

AN OLD-STYLE FARM.

SOME twenty odd years ago — more or less — I
chanced to be the owner of a wild, unkempt,
slatternly farm, of three or four hundred acres in
extent, amid the rocky fastnesses of eastern Connec-
ticut. The township in which it lay was a scattered
wilderness of a settlement, lying along the Hartford
and New London turnpike. There was a toll-gate (I
remember that) ; and I have a fancy that the toll-gath-
erer was a sallow-faced shoemaker with club-feet, who
sometimes made his appearance with a waxed-end in
his mouth, and a flat-headed hammer in his hand.
He hardly wields the hammer any more ; and his last
waxed-end must long ago have been drawn tight, and
clipped away.

There was a wild common over which the Novem-
ber winds swept with a pestilent force, with nothing
to break them, except a pair of twin churches. One
1

2 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

of these was Congregational — severely doric, with
square-headed windows, painted columns, and a cupola
for ornamentation. The other was Episcopal, with
sharp-headed windows, and three or four crazy-look-
ing turrets ; but the paint upon this latter was nearly
worn away by the storm-gusts that beat unbroken
over the Common. I am compelled to say too that
the services were only occasional in this gothic taber-
nacle ; and regret exceedingly to add that, after a
fitful and spasmodic life, the Episcopal society which
maintained nominal ownership of this turreted temple
made over its interest and debts to certain worldly
parties, and the sharp-headed windows now shed their
light upon " town meetings," and the late church is
abased to the uses of a town hall. It must be said,
that the rural residents of New England have no
large or growing appreciation of the beautiful Litany.
They like long sermons and a " talking out " in
prayer. You or I may feel differently ; but the men
and women of those retired districts, where books
and newspapers rarely come, want to hear on a Sun-
day what the parson will say — not only in his sermon,
but in his invocations.

The doric meeting-house, however, gloried in a
thick, white sheen of paint. The blinds were green
to a fault. No exterior mark of prosperity seemed
wanting but a flanking line of horse-sheds, the lack

AN OLD-STYLE FARM, 3

of which upon that bare waste was a terrible source
of discomfort to the poor brutes who, after a drive
of three, four, or even five miles, stood shivering in
the December weather under the lee of the fences.
A good, kind parson, who presided over the parish
in the days of which I speak, was earnest in his appeals
for shelter to the poor brutes, (my little bay mare
often shivering among them,) but the charitable en-
thusiasm of the good minister counted for nothing ;
and to this day, as I am credibly informed, the " con-
templated sheds " remain unbuilt.

There was a tavern, lying to the northward, along
the turnpike ; and if I remember rightly, the tavern-
keeper was a deacon — a staid man, of course, who
kept an orderly house, and whose daughters, in flam-
boyant ribbons, were among the belles of the parish.
The father was, I believe, a most worthy man ; but
his rusty brown wig showed badly beside the great
flock of golden curls that flanked him in his meeting-
house pew. His boys were absentees, and addicted
to horse-trading.

There was a cooper's shop upon the sprawling
street, in which a great clatter and bang were kept
up every work-day upon shad-barrels. There was
a carriage-repairing shop ; and another way-side
smithy, where time and time again, I have watched
the heaving of the bellows, and the flying of the

4 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

sparks, as the grimy workman pounded out the iron
shoes, for which " Debby " stood patiently in waiting.

There was a green country store, where " domes-
tics " were sold, and West India sugars, and hoes —
" Ames' best cast-steel " — and, I greatly fear, occa-
sional tipple. It was burned down long ago ; ten
years after, I saw the yawning, ragged cellar, and a
giant growth of stramonium springing from the door-
step.

There was also somewhere along this dreary street
a manufactory of musical instruments — whether of
harps or organs I cannot justly say ; but I have been
given to understand that the manufactory has since,
under zealous and spirited management, grown into a
great musical institute, where young misses in white
(with blue sashes) woo the muses with a thundering
success. But more distinctly than the manufactory
— whatever it may have been — I remember a little
brook, that stole away in the meadows thereabout
under clumps of alder, under lines of willows, under
plank bridgelets, and how, on many a May day my
line drifted on into dark pools, until some swift strike
gave warning of a venturesome, golden-spotted swim-
mer that presently tossed and flounced in my creel.
I profess no great love for music — no knowledge of
it even ; but the whizzing of a reel which a pound
trout will make at the end of thirty feet of taper line

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 5

is to me very charming — charming in those old days
when the woods and meadows were new, and charm-
ing now when the woods and the meadows are old.
Well, well, I began to tell the story of a farm, and
here I am idling along the borders of a brook !

The toll-gate, the churches, the tayern, the store
lay strewn along a high-road, three miles away from
the valley-farm, of which in those days I was busy
occupant. And yet so bare of trees was the interval,
that from many a nook under the coppices of the
pasture-land I could see the twin churches, the tavern,
and, with a glass, detect even a stray cow, or the lum-
bering coach which from time to time wended along
the high-road of the village.

The farm was suitably divided (as the old adver-
tisements were wont to say) into tillage, meadow, and
pasture-lands. This distribution of parts implied that
the meadows would furnish enough hay in ordinary
seasons for the winter's keep of such and so many
animals, as the pastures carried in good condition
through the summer ; and the arable land was sup-
posed equal to the growth of such grain and vege-
tables as would suffice for man and beast throughout
the year. It was an old, lazy reckoning of capabili-
ties, which implied little or no progress, and which
took no account of any systematic rotation. I never
see a farm advertised under the formula I have named

6 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

— suitably divided into tillage, mowing, and pasture-
land — but I feel sure that the advertiser is a respect-
able, old-fashioned gentleman, who keeps a long-tailed
black coat for Sundays and training-days, and who
has inherited his agricultural opinions from a very
dull and stiff-necked ancestry. Such announcements
— and they are to be seen not unfrequently in the
journals — impress me very much as the advertise-
ment of a desirable dwelling might do — " suitably
divided into cooking, eating, and sleeping quarters."

There are, to be sure, rough pasture-lands strewn
with rocks, or full of startling inequalities of surface,
which must retain for an indefinite period their office
for simple grazing purposes ; but, with rare excep-
tions, there are not anywhere in the northeastern
States any considerable stretches of meadow capable
of growing the better English grasses, which are not
susceptible of improvement under occasional tillage.
Draining, indeed, may be first needed, and a scarify-
ing with the harrow, to root out the old mosses and
foul growth ; but after this, a clean lift of the plow
and judicious dressing will work wonders.

But, to return, (for I wish to make the picture of
an old-fashioned farm complete,) there were mossy
meadows lying along the borders of a great romping
millstream, which had been mown for forty years
without intermission ; here and there, where these

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 7

meadows lifted into gravelly mounds, patches of plow-
land had been taken up at intervals of five or eight
years, and by dint of heavy, laborious cartage of the
scant manures from the barnyard, over the interven-
ing meadow " swales ", had shown their periodic
growth of corn or potatoes, these followed by oats —
more or less rank as the season was wet or dry — and
again, on the following year by clover, which in its
turn was succeeded by red-top and timothy — upon
which the wild meadow-growth steadily encroached.
There was, of course, the "barn-lot," of which all
old farmers boasted, maintained in a certain degree
of foodful succulence and luxuriant fertility by reason
of the leakage and waste which it inevitably secured,
and whose richness was due rather to lack of care
than to skilL There were intervals too of meadow
upland, through which some little rivulet from the
pasture hill-side meandered on its way to the larger
brook of the lowland, and which were kept in verdant
wealth (no thanks to any human manager) by the
refreshing influences of the rivulets alone. Four or
five such straggling brooklets murmured down from
the pasture high-lands, and a Devonshire farmer
would have given to each one a wide and wealth-giv-
ing distribution over acres and acres of the slanting
meadows. But there was nothing of this. They
watered their little rod-wide margin of succulent

8 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

grasses, then dropped away into some marshy flat,
where the flags and rushes grew rampantly, until these
too gave place to alders, poison sumacs, soft maples
and black-ash trees.

The fences were as motley as the militiamen's
coats on a first Monday of May. From time to time
some previous tenant or owner had devoted " fall
leisure " to the erection of a wall — mostly in continua-
tion of a great range of barrier which separated the
hill-lands from the flat. In this erection each owner's
views of economy (no other views being recognized)
had taken wide divergence. Thus, one had given a
circular sweep to his trail, for the sake of inclosing
some tempting smooth spot upon the lowest slope of
the hills ; another had made a flanking movement in
the other direction, for the sake of excluding some
unfortunate little group of innocent rocks. But the
sinners and the well-doers, on the score of the wall-
ing, must have long before gone to their account,
since the stones were all mossy, and the frequent gaps
had been blocked up by lopping over some vigorous
young hickory or chestnut which had started from
the base of the wall.

But even this rustic device had not given full
security, for with settlements and the " bulging "
under frosts, this great line of barrier was no proof
against the clambering propensities of the sheep ; and

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 9

the whole line of fence had been topped with long
poles, kept in their places by cross stakes firmly
driven into the ground and sustaining the " riders "
at the point of intersection. To complete the fence
picture, I have to add to those half-lopped hickories in
the gaps — to those bulging tumors of stone — to those
gaunt over-riding poles — a great array of blackberry
briers, of elders, of dog-willows, of dried stems of
golden-rod, of raspberries, and of pretentious wild-
cherries. Still further, I must mark down a great
sprawling array of the scattered wall, in some half-
dozen spots, where adventurous hunters had made a
mining foray after some unfortunate woodchuck or
rabbit.

So much for the average New England walling in
retired districts twenty years ago. Is it much better
now ? As for the wooden fencing, there stretched
across the meadow by the road a staggering line of
" posts and rails " — one post veering southward the
next veering northward — a wholly frightful line,
which was like nothing so much as a file of tipsy
soldiers making vain efforts to keep " eyes right." In
the woodlands and upon the borders of the farm,
were old, lichen-covered Virginia fences, sinking rail
by rail into the earth ; luxuriant young trees were
shooting up in the angles, brambles were overgrow-
ing them, and poisonous vines — the Bhus Toxicoden-
1*

io OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

dron among them (which country people call mer-
cury, ivy, and I know not what names beside) — and
this entire range of exterior fence was gone over each
springtime — April being the usual month — and made
effective, by lopping upon it such lusty growth as
may have sprung up the season past. It is afflictive
to think what waste of natural resources is committed
in this way every year by the scrubby farmers of New
England.

The stock equipment of this farm of nearly four
hundred acres, consisted of twelve cows, some six
head of young stock, two yoke of oxen, a pair of
horses, and a hundred and fifty sheep. I blush even
now as I write down the tale of such poor equipment
for a farm which counted at least two hundred and
seventy acres of open land — the residue being wood,
or impenetrable swamp. And it is still more melan-
choly to reflect that the portion of the land which
aided most in the sustenance of this meagre stock,
was that which was most nearly in a state of nature.
I speak of those newly cleared pasture-lands from
which the wood had been removed within ten years.
In giving this description of a farm of twenty years
ago, I feel sure that I am describing the available
surface of a thousand farms in N"ew England to-day.
We boast indeed of our thrift and enterprise, but
these do not work in the direction of land culture —

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. \\

at least not in the way of that liberal and generous
culture which insures the largest product. I doubt
greatly if there be any people on the face of the
earth, equally intelligent, who farm so poorly as the
men of New England ; and there are tens of thou-
sands less intelligent who manage their lands infinitely
better. I do not quite understand why the American
character, which has shown such wonderful aptitude
for thrift in other directions, should have shown so
little in the direction of agriculture. I feel quite con-
fident that seven out of ten of the most accomplished
and successful nurserymen, gardeners, and farmers in
the country, are of foreign birth, or of foreign parent-
age. Within the limits of my own experience, I find
it infinitely more difficult to secure a good American
farmer, than to secure a good Scotch or even an Irish
one. And I observe with not a little shame, that
while the American is disposed to make up the tale
of his profits by sharp bargains, the Scotch are as
much disposed to make it up by liberal treatment of
the land. Why is this ? The American is not illib-
eral by nature ; a thousand proofs lie to the contrary ;
but by an unfortunate traditional belief he is disposed
to count the land only a rigorous step-dame from
which all possible benefit is to be wrested, and the
least possible return made.

Is the Congressional grant for agricultural colleges

12 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

to work a change in this belief in the minds of those
who hold the great mass of the land under control ?
Not surely until the newly started colleges shall have
made some more vigorous practical demonstration than
they have made thus far. The bearings of science
upon agriculture were well taught previously under
the wing of the established universities ; what the
public had reason to hope from the new endowment
was such practical exhibit of the economic value of a
thorough system in tillage and management, as should
carry conviction to the popular mind. As yet we
wait in vain. Looking at results thus far, I am
strongly of the opinion that a few thousands devoted
to the gratuitous distribution of one or two sterling
agricultural newspapers would have worked more
good to the farming interests of the community, than
the millions which have been committed to the wis-
dom of the several State legislatures. I have no hope
that these views will meet the concurrence of those
who have present control of the funds ; nor do I
mean to express a doubt of the honesty and good
intentions of those who have become the supervisors
of this great trust ; but I am strongly of the assurance
that the common sense of the country is largely dis-
posed to ask of the scientific gentlemen who have
been so largely the recipients of this congressional
bounty some practical demonstration upon the land,
of the faith they hold and teach.

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 13

I coine back to the old farm, with its meagre
stock and its wide acres. Of course there was some-
thing to be sold. Farmers never get on without that.
First of all, came the " veals " — selling in that day
for some two cents a pound, live weight. (They now
sell in the New York market for ten.) This bridged
over the spring costs, until the butter came from the
first growth of the pastures.

— How well I remember tossing myself from bed
at an hour before sunrise (Seth by previous orders
having the horse and wagon ready), and by candle-
light seeing to the packing of the spring butter — the
firkins being enwrapped in dewy grass, fresh cut —
and then setting forth upon the long drive (twelve
miles) to the nearest market town. What a drive it
was ! Five miles on, I saw the early people stirring
and staring at me, as they washed their faces in the
basin at the well. Then came woods, and silence, but
a strange odorous freshness in the air — possibly some
near coal-pit gave its kreosotic fumes, not unpleasant ;
some owl, in the swamps I passed, lifted its melancholy
hoot ; further on I saw some early riser driving his
cows to pasture ; still further I caught sight of chil-
dren at play before some farm-house door, and the
sun being fairly risen, I knew their breakfasts were
waiting them within.

After this, I passed occasional teams upon the

14 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

road, and gave a " good morning " to the drivers.
Then came the toll-gate : I wondered if the day's
profits would be equal to the toll ? After this came
the milk wagons whisking by me, and I envied them
their short rounds ; at last (the sun being now two
hours high) came sight of the market town — city, I
should say; for the legislature had given it long
before the benefit of the title ; and on the score of
church spires, and taverns, and shops, and news-
papers, and wickedness, it deserved the name.

I wish I could catch sight once more of the old
gentleman (a good grocer as the times went) who
plunged his thumb-nails into my golden rolls of but-
ter, and said : " We're buying pooty fair butter at
twelve and a half cents, but seein' as it's you, we'll
say thirteen cents a pound for this ;" and he cleaned
his thumb-nail upon the breech of his trowsers.

I am not romancing here, I am only telling a
plain, straightforward story of my advent, some
twenty years ago, upon a summer's morning into the
city of !N" — . I recall now vividly the detestably
narrow and muddy streets — the poor horse, (I had
bought it of the son of our deacon,) wheezing with
his twelve-mile drive — my own empty faint stomach
— the glimpses of the beautiful river between the
hills — and the golden butter which I must needs sell
to my friend the grocer at thirteen cents. I hope he

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 15

had never any qualms of conscience ; but it is a faint
hope to entertain. I knew a single naively honest
one ; but to him I never offered anything for sale. I
feared he might succumb to that temptation.

After the butter, (counting some forty odd pounds
in weight per week,) the next most important sale was
that of the lambs and wool. The lambs counted ordi-
narily— leaving out the losses of the newly dropped
ones, by crows * and foxes — some hundred or more.
And nice lambs they were ; far better than the half I
find in the markets to-day. Nothing puts sweeter and
more delicate flesh upon young lambs than that luxu-
riant growth of herbage which springs from freshly
cleared high-lying wood-lands. In piquancy and rich-
ness, it is as much beyond the lambs of stall-fed
sheep, as the racy mutton of the Dartmoors is beyond
the turnip-fatted wethers of the downs of Hampshire.
And yet these lambs were delivered to the butcher
at an ignoble price ; I think a dollar and a half a head
was all that could be secured for animals which in

* Enthusiastic bird-lovers will learn, may be with surprise, that
crows are capable of this mischief, but it is even true. Their vil-
lainous method is to pluck out the eyes of the newly born innocents,
and then leave their prey until death and putrefaction shall have
ripened it to their taste. Only extreme hunger, however, will drive
the crow to such game. I think I have never felt more murderously
inclined than when I have seen upon a bleak day of April one of
these black harpies perched upon the head of its faintly struggling
victim, and deliberately plucking away the eyes from the socket.

1 6 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the city would bring to-day nearly five dollars. The
wool was bought up by speculators in that time, and
the speculators were not extravagant. I remember
very well driving off upon a summer's afternoon,
mounted upon twelve great sacks of fleeces, and being
rather proud of my receipts, at the rate of twenty-
eight cents per pound. (The same wool would have
brought two years since eighty cents per pound.)

After we disposed of the butter and the wool, and
during the late autumn months, came the cartage of
wood — some eight miles — to a port upon the river, at
which four dollars per cord was paid for good oak
wood, and five for hickory. At present rates of
labor, these are sums which would not pay for the
cutting and cartage.

I must not forget the swine — two or three vener-
able porkers, and in an adjoining pen a brood of
young shoats — that would equip themselves in great
layers of fat, from the whey during the hot months,
and the yellow ears of corn with the first harvesting
of October. Day after day, through May, through
June, came the unwearied round of 'milking, of driv-
ing to pasture, of plowing, of planting ; day after day
the sun beat hotter on the meadows, on the plow-
land, on the reeking sty ; day after day the buds
unfolded — the pink of orchards hung in flowery sheets
over the scattered apple trees ; the dogwood threw

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 17

out its snowy burden of blossoms from the edges of
the wood ; the oaks showed their velvety tufts, and
with midsummer there was a world of green and of
silence — broken only by an occasional " Gee, Bright ! "
of the teamster, or the cluck of a matronly hen, or
hum of bees, or the murmur of the brook. All this
inviting to a very dreamy indolence, which, I must
confess, was somehow vastly enjoyable.

Nothing to see ? Lo, the play of light and shade
over the distant hills, or the wind, making tossed and
streaming wavelets on the rye. Nothing to hear ?
Wait a moment and you shall listen to the bursting
melodious roundelay of the merriest singer upon
earth — the black and white coated Bob-o'-Lincoln, as
he rises on easy wing, floats in the sunshine, and
overflows with song, then sinks, as if exhausted by
his brilliant solo, to some swaying twig of the alder
bushes. Nothing to hope ? The maize leaves through
all their close serried ranks are rustling with the
promise of golden corn. Nothing to conquer ? There
are the brambles, the roughnesses, the inequalities,
the chill damp earth, the whole teeming swamp-land.

I have tried to outline the surroundings and ap-
pointments of many a back country farmer of New
England to-day. I am sure the drawing is true,
because it is from the life. I seem to see such an one
now on one of those May mornings an hour before

1 8 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

sunrise. It is his market day, and the old sorrel inare
is harnessed, and tied to the hitch-post. The wagon
is of antique shape, bulging out in front and rear, and
with half-rounded ends. The high-backed seat is sup-
ported upon a V-shaped framework of ash, and cov-
ered over with a yellow buffalo skin, of which the
fur is half worn away. An oaken firkin is presently
lifted in, with a white linen cloth shut down under
its cover, and a corner of the buffalo turned over it
to shield it from the dust and the sunshine. Then
comes a bushel basket of eggs, packed in rowen hay ;
next the great clothes-basket, covered with a table
cloth, in which lie the two hind quarters of a veal
killed yesterday, (the fore quarters being kept for
home consumption.) In the corner of the wagon is
thrust a squat jug — its stopper being a corn-cob
wrapped around with newspaper — which is to be
filled with " Port o' reek " molasses. Then, at last,
Jerusha, the wife, in silver spectacles, and Sunday
gown, clambers in — a stout woman, with her waist
belted in, after a loose sausage-like way — who has a
last word for her ' darter ' Sally Ann, and then
another last word, and who cautions Enos (her hus-
band) about " turnin' too short," and who asks if the
mare " an't gittin' kind o' frisky with the spring
weather ? "

So they drive away — Enos and Jerushy. They

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 19

talk of the new " howsen " along the way ; they dis-
cuss the last Sunday's sermon : Enos says, " I've
heerd that Hosea Wood is a cortin' JYlalviny Smith."

" Don't b'lieve a word on't, Enos. No sich a
thing. Did you put a baitin' for the hoss in the
waggin, Enos ? "

" No, I vum ! I forgot it," says Enos.

" What a plaguey careless creeter you're a gittin'
to be, Enos ! "

And so the good worthy couple jog on. In town,
the jug is filled ; the stout matron peers through her
spectacles at tapes, thread, needles, and a stout " cal-
iker " gown (fast colors) for Sally Ann. Pater-fami-
lias sees to the filling of the flat jug, he makes a fair
sale of the two quarters of veal, he buys a few " gard-
ing " seeds, a new rake, a scythe snathe, and dickers
for a grindstone — unavailingly. Two hours before
nightfall, the good couple jog homeward again, with
humdrum quietude.

It is not such a scene of domesticity as I ever
forecast for my own enjoyment. I believed, and still
believe, that the dead life upon the back country
New England farms, is capable of being stirred into
a live life. Over and over I forecast the day when
the inequalities should be smoothed, the swamps
drained, the woodlands cleared up, (leaving only here
and there some clump of giant oaks or chestnuts

20 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

about a loitering brooklet,) the cattle quadrupled in
number, the muck-lands yielding their harvests to be
composted with the concentrated manures of the
town, the very walls to be straightened (of which a
beginning had been made), and such stir and move-
ment and growth and cumulative fertility as should
make the neighborhood open its eyes wide, and stare
to a purpose. I saw the wasting rivulets dammed
and distributing their fertilizing flow over acres of
the side-land ; I saw the maple swamps giving place
to wide stretches of heavy meadow ; I saw the wild
growth of the pasture-lands cut and piled and burned,
and all the hillsides glittering with a new wealth of
green.

But it was not to be. In the very heat of the
endeavor, there came a flattering invitation to change
the scene of labor and of observation, a single night
only being given for decision. I remember the night
as if only this morning's sun broke it, and kindled it
into day. One way, the brooks, the oaks, the crops,
the memories, the homely hopes, lured me ; the other
way, I saw splendid and enticing phantasmagoria —
London Bridge, St. Paul's, Prince Hal, Fleet Street,
Bolt Court, Kenilworth, wild ruins. Next morning
I gave the key of the corn-crib to the foreman, and
bade the farm-land adieu.

Within a month I was strolling over the fields of

AN OLD-STYLE FARM. 21

Lancashire; wondering at that orderly, systematic
cultivation of which New England had not dreamed
— wondering at the grand results of this liberal and
generous culture, and more than ever disgusted at the
pinched and starveling way in which my countrymen
were cheating the land of its opulent privilege of pro-
duction.

I have written this little descriptive episode of
a farm-life in New England to serve as the background
for certain illustrative hints toward the amendment
of rural life — whether in matters of good husbandry,
or of good taste ; I have furthermore ventured upon
certain homeliness of detail in these opening pages, to
show that I may have privilege of speech.

There is no manner of work done upon a New
England farm to which some day I have not put my
hand — whether it be chopping wood, laying wall,
sodding a coal-pit, cradling oats, weeding corn, shear-
ing sheep, or sowing turnips. Therefore, in any
future references which I may make in the course of
these papers to farm life, I trust that my good readers
will credit me with a certain connaissance de cause.

n.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.

AD VICE FOR LACKLAND.

Pomologists and Common People.

I DO not know that the Horticulturists proper are
the best advisers of a man who wishes — as so many
do in these times — to establish his little home in the
country, and to make it charming with fruits and
flowers, and all manner of green things. I think that
the professional tastes or successes of one devoted to
Horticulture might lead him into a great many extrav-
agances of suggestion, in the entertainment of which,
the plain country liver — making lamentable failures —
would lose courage and faith. The Pomologists may
indeed say that there is no reason to make failure if
their suggestions are followed to the letter, and the
proper amount of care bestowed. This may be very
true ; but they do not enough consider that nine out
of ten who love the country, and its delights of garden
2

26 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

or orchard, can never be brought to that care and
nicety of observation, which, with the devoted Hor-
ticulturist, is a second nature.

Most men goto the country to make an easy thing
of it. If they must commence study of all the later
discoveries in vegetable physiology, and keep a sharp
eye upon all new varieties of fruit — lest they fall be-
hind the age ; and trench their land every third year,
and screen it — may be — in order to ensure the most
perfect comminution of the soil, they find themselves
entering upon the labors of a new profession, instead
of lightening the fatigues of an old one. Any
thorough practice of Horticulture does indeed involve
all this ; but there are plenty of outsiders, who, with-
out any strong ambition in that direction, have yet a
very determined wish to reap what pleasures they can
out of a country life, by such moderate degree of
attention and of labor as shall not overtax their time,
or plunge them into the anxieties of a new and en-
grossing pursuit.

What shall be done for them ? To talk to such
people — and I dare say scores of them maybe reading
these pages now — about the comparative vigor of a
vine grown from a single eye, or a vine grown from a
layer, or about the shades of difference in flavor be-
tween a Vicomtesse berry and a Triomphe de Gand —
is to talk Greek to them ; it is a,t> if a druggist were

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 27

to talk about the comparative influences of potash or
of some simple styptic upon an irritated mucous
membrane, to a man who wants simply — something
to cure a sore throat. It is the aim of the Horticul-
turist to push both land and plants to the last limit
of their capacity — to establish new varieties — to pro-
voke nature by incessant pinchings into some abnor-
mal development ; whereas the aim of the mass of
suburban residents is to have a cheery array of flowers
— good fruit and plenty of it, at the smallest possible
cost. If indeed the latter have any hope of winning
what they wish, by simple transfer of their home
from city to country, without any care or cost what-
ever, they are grossly mistaken. If a mere, bald love
of fruit-eating, without any love for the ways of its
production — calls a man to the country, I would
strongly advise him to stay in town, and buy fruit
at the city markets ; and the man who goes into the
country merely to stretch his legs, I would as strongly
advise to do it on Broadway, or in bed. Nature is a
mistress that must be wooed with a will ; and there
is no mistress worth the having, that must not be
wooed in the same way.

But the distinction remains which I have laid
down between the aims of the Pomologists and of the
quiet country liver. And I am strongly inclined to
think that the former are a little too much disposed

28 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

to sneer at the simple tastes of the latter. There is a
sturdy professional pride that enters into this, for
something. I have before now been thrown into the
company of breeders of blooded stock who would not
so much as notice the best native animals — no matter
how tenderly cared for, or how assiduously combed
down ; and yet a good dish of cream most people
relish, even if the name of the cow is not written in
the Herd-books. Of course that nice discrimination
of tastes which enables a man to detect the minute
shades of difference in flavors, is a thing of growth
and long culture, and every man is inclined to respect
what has cost him long culture. But if I smack my
lips over the old Hovey, or a mahogany colored Wil-
son, and stick by them, I do not know that the zeal-
ous Pomologist has a right to condemn me utterly,
because I do not root up my strawberry patches and
plant Russell's Prolific, or the Jucunda in their place.
It is even doubtful if extreme cultivation of taste does
not do away with a great deal of that hearty gusto
with which most men enjoy good fruit. The man
who is all the summer through turning some little
tid-bit of flavor upon the tip of his tongue, and going
off into fits of rumination upon the possible difference
of flavor between a Crimson-Cone when watered from
an oak tub, and a Crimson-Cone when watered from
a chestnut tub, seems to me in a fair way of losing all

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 29

the appreciable and honest enjoyment of fruit which
he ever had in his life. There lives about the London-
Dock- Vaults a race of pimpled-faced men whose pro-
fessional service it is to guzzle small draughts of
Chateau Margaux or of rare Port, which they whip
about with their tongues and expend their tasting
faculties upon, with enormous gravity : but who in
the world supposes that these can have the same
appreciation of an honest bumper of wine, which a
quiet Christian gentleman has, who sits down to his
dinner with a moderate glass of good, sound Bor-
deaux at his elbow ?

Outsiders may, I think, find a little comfort in
this, and take courage in respect of their old Hovey
patches — if they will keep them only clean and rich.

But I have not said all this out of any want of
regard for Horticulture as an art, demanding both
skill and devotion ; nor have I said it from any want
of respect for those pomologists who are boldly lead-
ing the van in the prosecution of the Art ; but I have
wished simply to clear away a little platform from
which to talk about the wants of humble cultivators,
and the way in which those wants are to be met.

And here my old question recurs — what shall be
done for them ?

To give my reply definite shape, I picture to my-
self my old friend Lackland, who has grown tired of

30 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

thumping over the city pavements, who has two or
three young children to whom he wishes to give a
free tumble on the green sward, and who has an in-
tense desire to pick his grapes off his own vine, in-
stead of buying them on Broadway at forty cents the
pound. He comes to me for advice.

" My dear fellow," I should say, " there's no giv-
ing any intelligible advice to a man whose notions
are so crude. Do you want a country home for the
year, or only a half home for six months in the year,
from which you'll be flitting when the leaves are
gone ? "

" To be sure," says he, " it's worth considering.
And yet what difference could it make with your
suggestions? Once established, I could determine
better."

" It makes this difference : — if you propose to es-
tablish a permanent home for the year, you want to
provide against wintry blasts ; you don't want a hill-
top where a northwester will be driving in your teeth
all November ; you want shelter ; and you want near
walks for your children through the snow-banks to
school or church ; and you don't want the sea boom-
ing at the foot of your garden all winter long. If it's
only a summer stopping place you have your eye
upon, all these matters are of little account."

"Suppose we make it a permanent home," says

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 31

Lackland, " how much ground do I want to grow all
the fruit and vegetables I may need for my family ? "

" That depends altogether upon your mode of
culture. If you mean to trench and manure thorough-
ly, and have good soil to start with, and keep it up
to the best possible condition, a half acre will more
than supply you."

" Call it two acres," says he, " and what shall I
plant upon it ? "

What shall a man plant upon his two acres of
ground, on which he wishes to establish a cozy home,
where his children can romp to their hearts' content,
and he — take a serene pleasure in plucking his own
fruit, pulling his own vegetables, smelling at his own
rose-tree and smoking under his own vine ? If he
goes up with the question to some high court of Hor
ticulture, he comes away with a list as long as my
arm — in which are remontants that must be strawed
over, vines that must be laid down, vegetables that
must be coaxed by a fortnight of forcing, rare shrubs
that must have their monthly pinching, monster ber-
ries that must have their semi-weekly swash of guano
water, and companies of rare bulbs that, after wilting
of the leaves, must be dug, and dried, and watched,
and put out of reach, and found again, and replanted.

And my friend Lackland reporting such a list to
me, sees a broad grin gradually spreading over my face.

32 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

" You think it a poor list, then ? " says he.

" I beg your pardon ; it's a most capital one ;
there are the newest things of every sort in it ; and
if you cultivate them as they ought to be cultivated,
you'll make a fine show ; they'll elect you member of
a Horticultural Society ; heaven only knows but
they'll name you on a tasting committee."

" That would be jolly," says he.

"And you'll need plenty of bass-matting, and
patent labels, and lead wire, and a box of grafting
instruments, and brass syringes of different capacities,
and gauze netting for some of your more delicate
fruits, and porcelain saucers to float your big goose-
berries in, and forcing beds, and guano tanks, and a
small propagating house, and a padlock on your
garden, and a Scotchman to keep the key at seventy
dollars a month, and a fag to work the compost-heaps
at forty-five more."

" The devil I will ! " he says.

" Don't be profane," I should say, " or if you
needs must, you'll have better occasion for it when
you get fairly into the traces."

And then — more seriously — " My dear fellow, the
list, as I have said, is a capital one ; but it supposes
most careful culture, extreme attention, and a love
for all the niceties of the art — which you have not.
You want to take things easv ; you don't want to

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 33

torment yourself with the idea that your children
may be plucking unaware your specimen berries ; you
don't want to lock them out of the garden. As sure
as you undertake such a venture you'll be at odds
with your Scotchman ; you'll lose the names of your
own trees ; you'll forget the hyacinths ; your * half-
hardys ' will all be scotched by the second winter ;
your dwarf * Vicars ' that need such careful nursing
and high dressing will dwindle into lean shanks of
pears that have no flavor. My advice to you is — to
throw the fine list in the fire ; to limit yourself, until
you have felt your way, to some ten or a dozen of
the best established varieties ; don't be afraid of old
things if they are good; if a gaunt Rhode Island
Greening tree is struggling in your hedge-row, trim
it, scrape it, soap it, dig about it, pull away the turf
from it, lime it, and then if you can keep up a fair
fight against the bugs and the worms, you will have
fine fruit • from it ; if you can't, cut it down. If a
veteran mossy pear tree is in your door-yard, groom
it as you would a horse — just in from a summering
in briary pastures — put scions of Bartlett, of Win-
ter Nelis, of Rostiezer into its top and sides. In an
unctuous spot of your garden, plant your dwarf
Duchess, Bonne de Jersey, Beurre Diel, and your
Glout Morceau. If either don't do well, pull it up

and burn it; don't waste labor on a sickly young
o*

34 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

tree. Save some sheltered spot for a trellis, where
you may plant a Delaware, an lona or two, a Re-
becca, and a Diana. Put a Concord at your south-
side door — its rampant growth will cover your
trellised porch in a pair of seasons : it will give
you some fine clusters, even though you allow it to
tangle : the pomologists will laugh at you ; "but let
them : you will have your shade and the wilderness
of frolicsome tendrils, and at least a fair show of
purple bunches. Scatter here and there hardy her-
baceous flowers that shall care for themselves, and
which the children may pluck with a will. Don't
distress yourself if your half acre of lawn shows
some hummocks, or dandelions, or butter-cups. And
if a Avild clump of bushes intrude in a corner, don't
condemn it too hastily ; it may be well to enliven it
with an evergreen or two — to dig about it, and paint
its edges with a few summer phloxes or roses. You
will want neither Scotchman nor forcing houses for
this."

This is the way in which I should have talked to
my friend Lackland, who would want to take things
easy.

I should not wonder if he were to buy his placfl
of two acres, and make trial. God bless him if b«j
does.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 35

Lackland Makes a Beginning.

MY friend Lackland — as I suspected he would —
has purchased a little place of two and a half
acres, some thirty or forty miles from the city by the

Xew X railway. He makes his trips to and

fro with a little badly-disguised fear of decayed
" sleepers," it is true ; and suffers from the still more
frequent embarrassment of riding upon his feet — all
the seats being occupied, and the company being
unfortunately too much straitened in their circum-
stances to add to the number of their carriages.
He was disposed to resent such things at the start,
and was even stirred into writing a brief and indig-
nant appeal to an independent morning journal ; but
upon being answered by an attorney for the company
or a road commissioner, who called him names and
abused him, as if he had been a witness before a
court of justice, he subsided into that meek respect
for corporations, and awe of all their procedure,
which are the characteristics of a good American
citizen, and of most well-ordered newspapers.

New Yorkers learn how to bear such things ;
there is no better schooling for submission than a
two or three years course of travel upon the city
railways ; Lackland is submissive. And after a

36 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

fatiguing day in Maiden Lane, having come up
Fourth Avenue with a stout woman in his lap, he
is grateful for even a standpoint upon one of the
New X cars.

But this is all by the way.

My friend Lackland has, as I said, bought a small
country place within a mile of village and station,
for which the purchase-money, in round numbers, was
six thousand dollars. A certain proportion of this
sum was paid in view of a projected horse railway,
which is to pass the door, and to unfold building
sites over his whole area of land. As yet, however,
it is in the rough. There is indeed " a brand-new
house upon it — two stories, and only three years
built," as he writes me, " with ell wash-room, and
all well painted with two coats of white lead. The
property is distributed into six different enclosures,
of which I send you a draught."

And herewith I give the exhibit of Mr. Lack-
land's little place, with its condition at time of pur-
chase.

" You will observe," he continues, " that there is
rather a cramped aspect about the door-yard and
entrance, these being hemmed in by a white picket
fence on either side and in front. It is unfortunately
the only sound fence about the premises ; the garden
(c) showing a tottering remnant of one of the same

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.

37

pattern, and the other enclosures never having boasted
anything finer than 'post and rail' fixtures, with a
half-wall to prop them upon some of the exterior
lines. The enclosure (d) is what the previous owner
called his back yard ; it was traversed, as you see, by
a cart-path leading straight to the barn court, and
was encumbered with a prodigious array of old wood,
brush heaps, a broken cart or two, and one of the
most luxurious thickets of burdock and stramonium
which I ever remember to have seen. He (former
owner) tells me stramonium is good for ' biles.' Is it ?
" The buildings around the little enclosure marked
(g) will explain themselves — a barn, a hog-pen, a cow-
shed— all in most dilapidated condition : so much so
that I shall have to make a new investment in the

38 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

way of stable room. There is the remnant of an old
orchard upon the plot marked (&), with only three or
four ragged and disorderly looking trees ; at (J)
again, there is a patch which has been in potatoes and
corn for an indefinite number of years, and which has
a terrible bit of ledge in the corner (marked m) over-
run with briars and stunted cedars, that I fear will
cost a round sum to redxice to a level. The fields (i)
and (A) are pieces of mangy grass scattered over with
occasional bushes, but I do not despair of putting a
smooth face upon them. The only view from the
premises that is worth considering, is rather a pretty
one (indicated by a dotted line) of the village spire,
and a few of the village roofs peeping out from the
trees, and back of them a glimpse of the Sound. I
send a rough sketch of it.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 39

"But the misfortune is, the view is only to
be seen to advantage from my wash-room door, or
from one spot in the garden just now encumber-
ed with enormous Lawton briars. The first posi-
tion is soapy and damp for visitors, and the last —
tedious.

" What I wish of you," — my friend Lackland con-
tinues to write, — " is to give me a hint or two about
the combing of this rough little home of mine into
shape. And in order to a more definite understand-
ing I will tell you briefly what I don't want, and next
what I do want.

"And first, being a plain man, I don't want
crooked walks, for the mere sake of having them
crooked ; I don't want to go into my gate in a hurry
— when I know dinner is already smoking on the
table — and yet, after entrance, be compelled to describe
a circle planted with I know not what barbarian ever-
gi'eens, before I can get to my door.

" I don't want my stable yard absolutely in sight ;
least of all do I wish to be compelled to traverse it,
before I can get sight of my pet mare.

" I don't wish a carriage drive to my door-step,
when my door is only fifty feet from the road by a
tape-line.

" I don't want to pull down or to move the present
house, because in so doing I should sacrifice a capital

40 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

cellar, which I must do the previous owner the justice
to say, has been capitally arranged.

" I don't want such a great array of fences ; I
don't want a labyrinth of walks ; I don't want my
garden so near the street as that chance passers-by
shall see me in my shirt sleeves and hail me with :
Hello ! Squire, what you goin' to ask a peck for them
pa'snips ? '

" I do want a little of good elbow-room about the
house and entrance, as if I were not in momentary
fear of an incursion of pigs from the back yard ; I do
want a garden of somewhat larger area, where I can
grub away at my will ; and if you draw me a plan,
put at least a fourth of the whole land into herbs and
garden stuff. I want the view kept of the village
spire, and the background of sea, and some lounging
place from which I may look upon it at my leisure.
I want a poultry-yard of such dimensions that I may
count upon a fresh egg every day to my breakfast ; I
want provision for a salad on Easter Sunday ; and if
you could contrive me some cheap fashion of a cold
grapery to try my hand upon, I should be thankful ;
only let it be so situated that I may (if grapes fail)
turn it into a winter room for my hens. I want you
to tell me what I can do with the rock I must blast
away from the edge in the corner of the potatoe-
patch. I want something I may call a lawn — to

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 41

satisfy my wife's pride — and a bit or two of snrub-
bery in it. But above all, I want at least a third of
the land in good wholesome greensward, with no
encumbering trees — whether fruit or exotic — where I
may turn my mare for a run, or play at base ball with
my boys, or cut a bit of hay, or — if the humor takes
me — try my hand at a premium crop of something."

Upon this I made a little study of Lackland's plot
of land, and furnished him with this design.

And I furthermore said to him, your ledge (which
I have marked g) is one of the most picturesque
features about your place ; so I have thrown it boldly
into your garden, in such way that it will be in full
view from the gate, and I advise you to cherish it —

42 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

to plant columbines on its ledges, and your Tom
Thumb geraniums along its lower edge, in such sort
that in autumn they will seem like a running flame
of fire skirting the cliff and blending with the crimson
verbenas upon the circle in the centre of the garden.
At (f) you have a map of the garden and your work
place, and to make the privacy of it entire, you may
plant a hedge for a barrier along the line (h) or you
may set a trellis there and cover it with vines. At
(e) you have a hot-bed to provide your Easter salad,
and you may multiply the hot-beds if you like along
the border (n) which is made under shelter of a high
fence to the north. At (c) fou have your cheap
grapery built against the south-side of the barn, and
convenient for the transmutation you suggest ; at (b)
is your stable, and at (d) your poultry house with a
sunny stable court to the south of it. At (tri) you
have your paddock for the mare, or your mall for
base-ball, or your plow-ground for a premium crop —
utterly free from shrubbery, and communicating with
barn and with street alike. The lawn explains and
describes itself; but I would only suggest that the
shrubbery marked (J) will be a capital spot, under
shade from south, for your Rhododendrons ; * and the

* Various horticulturists have discussed the method of isolating
a border of rhododendrons from the influences of a forest screen to
the south — one suggesting simple amputation of the roots of the

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 43

circle (I) I would advise you to fill with a dense cop-
pice of hemlock spruce to break the wind from the
north. Along the border marked (k) you can either
plant apple trees, and at fifteen feet of distance, a
thicker line of dwarf pears (being careful to trench or
subsoil the ground), or you can stock it with a pro-
tecting belt of evergreens. In either case, give
thorough cultivation, if you wish the best results.

At (a) is the " brand-new " house remodelled in
such fashion that you have a southern porch, a
kitchen in the rear, and a bay-window in your dining-
room, which commands (by the dotted line) the same
view which now wastes its charm upon the stout
woman at your wash-tub.

It is possible that my friend Lackland may report
progress to me some time in the course of the sum-
mer.

trees forming the screen, and the other the interposition of a wall.
The last is expensive and the former liable to be neglected. An
open ditch, some two feet deep by eighteen inches wide, I have seen
most effectively employed for the end proposed, by a very successful
southern horticulturist, who succeeded, year after year, in securing
a magnificent bloom of some ten or twelve varieties of Azaleas,
within twenty feet of gigantic cypresses and magnolias. The ditch
may also serve as a convenient receptacle for leaves and the rakinga
of the borders.

44 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Lackland 's Souse Plans.

TTKFOKTTJNATELY, almost every city gentle-
^-^ man who comes into possession — whether by
purchase or otherwise — of a plain country house,
from which some honest well-to-do farmer has just
decamped, puzzles his brain first of all, to know how
he shall make a " fine thing " of it. My advice to
such puzzled gentlemen, in nine cases out of ten,
would be — " not to do it."

If the ceilings are low, and the beams show here
and there the generous breadth and depth of timber
which old-time builders put into their frames, cherish
these remembrances of a sturdier stock than ours ;
scrub and paint and paper as you will, but if the
skeleton be stanch, and no dry rot shake the joints
or give a sway to the floors and ceiling — try, for a
few years at least, the moral effect of an old house.
It can do no harm to a dapper man from the city. It
may teach his wife possibly some of the humilities
which she cannot learn on Broadway. With a free,
bracing air whistling around the house corners, and
here and there an open fire within, low rooms are by
no means poisonous ; and if the trees do not so far
shade the roof as to keep away the fierce outpourings
of a summer's sun, and the low chambers carry a

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 45

stifling air in August, it is only necessary, in many
instances, to tear away the garret flooring, and to run
up the chamber ceilings into tent-like canopies, with
a ventilator in their peak — to have as free circulation
as in the town attics. And such tented ceilings may
be prettily hung with French striped papers, with a
fringe-like border at the line of junction of the verti-
cal with the sloping wall — in such sort that your
military friend, if he comes to pass a July night with
you, may wake with the illusion of the camp upon
him, and listen to such reveille as the crowing of a
cock, or the piping of a wren.

But a monstrous and intolerable grievance to all
people of taste lies in the attempt to set off one of
those grave exteriors, at which I have hinted, by
some of the more current architectural cockney isms.
Thus, an ancient door, with the dark green paint in
blisters upon it, and opening in the middle, perhaps,
is torn away to give place to the newest fancy from
the sash factories, and a glazing of red and blue.
For my part, I have great respect for a door that has
banged back and forth its welcomes and its good-
byes for half a century ; the very blisters on it seem to
me only the exuding humors of a jovial hospitality ;
and all the weather-stains are but honorable scars of
a host of battles against wind and rain. I would no
more barter such an old-time door against the new-

46 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

ness of the joiners, than 1 would barter old-time
honesty against that of Oil Creek, or of Wall Street.

Then again, your cockney must tear away the
laomely sheltering porch, with its plank " settles " on
either side, for some stupendous affair, with columns
for which all heathenism has been sacked to supply
the capitals.

If renovation must be made, it should be made in
keeping with the original style of the house — except
indeed change go so far as to divest it altogether of
the old aspect. In some farm-houses that may be
taken in hand for repairs, it might be well even to
strain a point in the direction of antiquity, and to
replace a swagging door by a stanch one of double-
battened oak or chestnut, with its wrought nails show
ing their heads in checkered diamond lines up and
down, and its hinges, worked into some fanciful pat-
tern of a dragon's tail, exposed. Then there should
be a ponderous iron knocker, whose din should reach
all over the house, and the iron thumb-latch — not cast
and japanned, but showing stroke of the hammer
and taking on rust where the maid cannot reach with
her brick-dust. Of course, too, there should be the
two diamond lights like two great eyes peering from
under the frontlet of the old-fashioned stoop. All
these, if the house be so ancient and weather-stained
as to admit of it, will demonstrate that the occupant

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 47

is among the few who are left in these days of petro-
leum, who make a merit of homeliness, and cherish
tenderly its simplest features. If the house be really
weak in the joints, the sooner it comes down the
better ; but if it has snugness and stiffness and com-
fort, let not the owner be persuaded of the carpenters
to graft upon it the modernisms of their tricksy
joinery. I can well understand how a dashing buck
of two or three and thirty should prefer a young
woman in her furbelows, to an old one in her bomb-
azine ; but if the fates put him in leash with an
ancient lady, let him think twice before he bedizens
her gray head with preposterous frontlets, and puts a
mesh of girl's curls upon the nape of her old neck.

I have said all this as a prelude to a little talk
about certain changes which my friend Lackland has
wrought in his country place — thirty miles away by

the New X road. The house he purchased could

boast no respectability of age. The height of its
rooms was of that medium degree which neither sug-
gested any notion of quaintness nor of airiness. Its
entrance-hall was pinched and narrow ; its stairway
inhospitably lean, and altogether its appointments
had that cribbed and confined aspect, which, to one
used to width and sunshine, was almost revolting.
The wash-room was positively the only apartment
below stairs which had a southern aspect. I give his

48 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

drawing of it, and it is a good type of a great many
" small and convenient houses " scattered through our
country towns.

" Of course, this will never do," wrote Lackland
to me, " and yet the skin of the house (as our car-
penter calls it) is very good, and I wish to make the
needed changes, so far as possible, without disturbing
the exterior outline of the main building. But how
shall I rid myself of that preposterously narrow en-
trance-way in which I can almost fancy Mrs. L., (who
is something large) getting wedged on some warm
day ? How shall I throw sunlight into that dismal
parlor? You will perceive that along the whole
south front there is not a single available window
below. Now, half the charm of a country place, to
my notion, lies in the possession of some sunny porch
upon which the early vines will clamber, and under
whose eaves the Phoebe birds will make their nests.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.

49

I want, too, my after-dinner lounges at a sunny door,
where I can smoke my pipe, basking in the yellow
light, as I watch the shadows chasing over the grass.
About the stupid little design I send you, there is
neither hope nor possibility of this.

" Again, even with a dining-room, or library
added, and perhaps a kitchen, I shall be still in want
of further chamber range, which if I gain (as our
carpenter suggests) by piling on a story more, it
appears to me that I should give to the narrow front
of the house an absurd cock-loft look that would be
unendurable.

" Mrs. L. and myself have scored out an incredible
number of diagrams — all which have been discussed,
slept on, admired, and eventually condemned. Some-
times it is the old pinched entrance way that works
3

50 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

condemnation ; sometimes (on my part) the lack of
sunny exposure ; and oftenest (on hers) the lack of
closets. She insists that no man yet ever planned a
house properly on this score. She doesn't see clearly
(*eing deficient in mathematics) why a closet shouldn't
be made in every partition wall. She don't definitely
understand, I think, why a person should thwack his
head in a closet under the stairs. She sometimes (our ,
carpenter tells us) insists upon putting a window
through a chimney ; and on one occasion (it was
really a very pretty plan) contrived so as to conduct
a chimney through the middle of the best bed room ;
and the nicest scheme of all, to my thinking, posi-
tively had the stairs left out entirely.

" In this dilemma, I want you to tell us what can
be done with the old shell, so as to make it passably
habitable, until we find out if this new passion for
country life is to hold good."

Upon this I ventured to send him this little plan
of adaptation, which, though not without a good
many faults that could be obviated in building anew,
yet promised to meet very many of their wants, and
gave to Lackland his sunny frontage.

" Here you have," I wrote him, " your south door,
and porch to lounge upon, and your south bow win-
dow to your library, which, if the rural tastes grow
upon you, you can extend into a conservatory, cover

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 51

ing the whole southern flank of the apartment. The
parlor, too, has its two south windows, and although

I should have preferred to place the chimney upon
the northern side, to the exclusion of the window
there, yet it seemed best to make use of the flue
already established. The hall is well lighted from
the north, and will give room for the hanging of any
of your great-aunt's portraits, if you have any.

" There is an objection to traversing the dining-
room in going from the kitchen to the hall-door ; but
it could not well be obviated, with the existing shell
of your house, without reducing the size of the dining-
room too much, or (another resource) without increas-
ing largely the dimensions of the hall — throwing the
intervening space between it and kitchen into store

52 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

rooms and making the library do duty for the spread
of your table.

" The dining-room, moreover, having only north
exposure, you may condemn as dismal. I propose to
obviate this and to give it a cheerful south light by
an extravagance which I dare say the architects will
condemn, but which will have its novelty and possi-
ble convenience.

M The fireplaces of library and of dining-room, are,
you observe, back to back. Now I would suggest
that the two flues be carried up with a sweep to
either side (uniting in the garret) in such sort, that a
broad arched opening shall be left above the mantel
from one room into the other. This may be draped,
if you like, with some tasteful upholstery ; but not so
far as to forbid a broad flow of the warm light from
the bow window of the library ; while upon the
mantels of even height, you may place a Wardian
case that shall show its delicate plumes of fern
between your table and the southern sunlight all
winter long. It would moreover be quite possible,
owing to the breadth of partition wall afforded by
the two flues, to arrange folding shutters for the
complete closing of the arch- way whenever desired.
For my own part, 1 love such little novelties of ar-
rangement, which mark a man's house as his own, how-
ever much they may put the carpenters to the gape.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.

53

" As for the additional chamber-room, never think
of putting a third story upon so narrow-throated a
house, or you will give it an irredeemable gawkyness.
If the space is needed, find it by throwing a more
generous roof over all (raising the plates if need be),
and lighting your cock-lofts with dormer windows.

Then paint with discretion ; avoid white, and all
shades of lilac — the most abominable color that was
ever put upon a house — you can't match the flow-
ers, and don't try, I beg. A mellow brown or a
cool gray are the best for the principal surfaces.
Let there be no forced contrasts, and no indecisive
mingling of tones ; above all, remember that with

54 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

your elevations, you want to aim to reduce the ap-
parent height ; work in, therefore, as many horizontal
lines of decisive color as your exterior carpentry will
allow ; give dark hoods, if you will, to your front
parlor windows, and let the cornice-finish below your
mansard roof reach well down, and carry dark shad-
ing.

" When you are fairly in, I will come and see how
you look."

Lackland's Gardener.

~YT"T"ITH his grounds laid out and his house in
* * fairly habitable condition — according to the
plans already laid before the reader — Lackland holds
various consultations in regard to a proper gardener
— consults as in duty bound, first of all, Mrs. Lack-
land.

Mrs. Lackland wishes an industrious, sober man,
who will keep the walks neat and tidy, who knows
enough of flowers not to hoe up any of her choice
annuals, — (whose seeds she dots about in all direc-
tions, marking the places with fragments of twigs
thrust in at all possible angles) ; she wishes moreover,
a good-natured man, who shall be willing to come
and pot a flower for her at a moment's notice ; one
who will not forget the sweet marjoram or the sage,

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 55

and who will not allow the thyme to die in the
winter.

He consults the city seedsmen, who refer him to
a half-dozen of stout men who may be lounging upon
the barrels in the front of their sales-rooms on almost
any fine morning in April; but, on entering into
parley with them, he is so confounded with their
talk about ranges, and pits, and bottom heat, and
Pelargoniums, and Orchids, that he withdraws in
disgust.

He consults the newspapers, where he finds a con-
siderable array of advertisements of " steady, capable
men, willing to make themselves useful upon a gentle-
man's place ; " he communicates with some two or
three of the most promising advertisers, and arranges
for an interview wilh them. Lackland has great faith,
like almost all the men I ever met, in his study of
physiognomy. About a man's temper or his honesty,
he can hardly be mistaken, he thinks, if he can once
set eyes upon him. He is therefore strongly disposed
in favor of a stout, jolly-faced Irishman, who assures
him he can grow as good " vigitables as enny man in
Ameriky."

" And flowers, Patrick (Patrick O'Donohue is his
name), you could take care of the flowers ? "

" Oh, flowers, and begorra, yis, sir — roses, pinks,
vi'lets — roses — whatever you wish, sir."
2*

56 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

" And, Patrick, you could harness a horse some-
times if it were necessary."

" Horses, and indade, yis, sir ; ye may jist say I'm
at home in a stable, sir."

" And the poultry, Patrick, you could look after
the poultry, couldn't you ? "

" And indade, sir, that's what I can ; there's niver
a man in the counthry can make hens lay as I can
make 'em lay."

In short, Lackland bargains with Patrick, and
reports him at the home-quarters " a perfect jewel of
a man."

The best of implements are provided, and a great
stock of garden seeds — the choice of the latter being
determined on after family consultation, in which all
the vegetables ever heard of by either party to the
counsel, have been added to the list. If a man have
a garden, why not enjoy all that a garden can pro-
duce— egg-plants, and okra, and globe artichokes, and
salsify, and white Naples radishes, and Brussels
sprouts ? The seed of all these are handed over to
the willing Patrick, who, as Mrs. Lackland im-
pressively enumerates the different labels (Patrick
not being competent to the reading of fine print,
as he freely confesses), repeats after her, " Naples
radish, yis, m'am ; artichokes, yis, m'am ; okra, yis,
m'am."

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 57

Lackland provides frames and glass for the early
salads he covets so much, and Patrick, with the fresh
sweepings of the stables, has presently a bed all
a-steam. At the mere sight of it the Lacklands regale
themselves with thoughts of crisp radishes, and the
mammoth purple fruit of the egg-plants. The seeds
are all put in — early cabbage, cauliflower, peppers,
radishes — under the same frame by the judicious
O'Donohue. The cabbages and the radishes come
forward with a jump. Their expedition forms a
pleasant theme for the physiological meditation of
Lackland. He is delighted with the stable manure,
with the cabbage seed, and with the O'Donohue. He
is inclined to think disrespectfully of the seed of
peppers and of egg plants in the comparison. But
the bland O'Donohue says, " We must give 'em a little
more hate."

And after some three or four days, Lackland is
stupefied, on one of his visits to his hot bed, to find
all his fine radishes and cabbages fairly wilted away ;
there is nothing left of them but a few sun-blackened
stumps ; the peppers and egg-plants show no signs of
germination.

" What does all this mean ? " says Lackland ;
" the cabbages are dead, Patrick."

" Yis, sir — it's the hate, sir. The sun is very strong
here, sir ; we must give 'em a little more air, sir."

58 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

And they get the air — get the air (by a little for-
getfulness on the part of Patrick) night as well as
day ; the peppers and egg-plants, after a fortnight
more of expectation, do not appear.

" How's this, Patrick ? no start yet."

" And are ye sure the seed's good, sir ? "

" It's all Thorburn's seed."

" Then, of course, it ought to be good, sir ; but,
ye see, there's a dale o' chatery now-a-days, sir."

In short, Lackland's man Patrick is a good-natured
blunder-head, who knows no better than to submit
his young cauliflowers and peppers to the same
atmospheric conditions in the forcing frame. The
result is that Lackland buys his first salads in the
market, and his first peas in the market, and his first
beets in the market. All these creep along very
slowly under Patrick's supervision, and the onion seed
is fairly past hope, being buried too deep for the sun
to have any influence upon its germinating proper-
ties.

" But how is this," says the long-suffering Lack-
land, at last, " our neighbors are all before us, Pat-
rick ? "

" Well, sir, it's me opinion that the land is a bit
cowld, sir. Wait till July, sir, and you'll see vigi-
tables,"

And Patrick grubs away with a great deal of

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 59

misdirected energy — slicing off, in the heat of his
endeavor, two or three of Mrs. Lackland's choicest
rocket larkspurs ; whereupon that lady conies down
upon him with some zeaL

"Larkspur! and that's a larkspur, is it, m'am
(scratching his head reflectingly) ? and, begorra, I
niver once thought 'twas a larkspur. Pity, pity ; and
so it was, indade, a larkspur ? Well, well, but it's
lucky it wa'nt a rose-bush, m'am."

And yet the good-natured blunder-head in the
shape of a gardener is far more endurable, to one
thoroughly interested in country life, than the surly
fellow who, if he gives you early vegetables, resents
a suggestion, and who will take a pride in making
any particular scheme of the proprietor miscarry by
a studied neglect of its details.

Upon the whole, I should lay down as sound
advice for any one who, like Lackland, is beginning
to establish for himself a home in the country that
shall be completely enjoyable, the following rules
with respect to the pursuit and employment of a
gardener :

First, if your notion of country enjoyment is
limited by thought of a good place where you may
lie down under the trees, and frolic with your chil-
dren, or smoke a pipe under your vine, or clambering
rose-tree at evening — find a gardener who is thorough-

60 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

ly taught, and who can place upon your table every
day the freshest and crispest of the vegetables and
fruits of the season, leaving you no care, but the care
of bills for superphosphates and trenching. If you
stroll into his domain of the garden, take your walk-
ing-stick or your pipe there, if you choose — but never
a hoe or a pruning knife. Joke with him, if you like,
but never advise him. Take measure of his fitness by
the fruits he puts upon your table, the order of your
grounds, and the total of your bills. If these are
satisfactory — keep him : if not, discharge him, as you
would a lawyer who managed your case badly, or a
doctor who bled or purged you to a sad state of
depletion.

If, on the other hand, in establishing a country
home, you have a wish to identify yourself with its
growth into fertility and comeliness, in such sort that
you may feel that every growing shrub is a little
companion for you and yours — every vine a friend —
every patch of herbs, of vegetables, or of flowers, an
aid to the common weal and pleasures of home, in
which you take, and will never cease to take, a per-
sonal interest and pride — if all this be true, and you
have as good as three hours a day to devote to per-
sonal superintendence — then, by all means, forswear
all gardeners who come to you with great recom-
mendations of their proficiency. However just these

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 61

may be, all their accomplishments, ten to one, will be
only a grievance to you. It is far better, if you be
really in earnest to taste ruralities to the full, to find
some honest, industrious fellow — not unwilling to be
taught — who will lend a cheerful hand to your efforts
to work out the problem of life in the country for
yourself

You will blunder ; but in such event you will
enjoy the blunders. You will burn your young cab-
bages, but you will know better another year. Your
first grafts will fail, but you will find out why they
fail You will put too much guano to your sweet
corn, but you will have a pungent agricultural fact
made clear to you. You will leave your turnips and
beets standing too thickly in the rows ; but you will
learn by the best of teaching — never to do so again.
You will buy all manner of fertilizing nostrums — and
of this it may require a year or two to cure you.
You will believe in every new grape, or strawberry,
— and of this it may require many years to cure you.
You will put faith, at the first, in all the horticultural
advices you find in the newspapers, — and of this you
will speedily be cured.

In short, whoever is serious about this matter, of
taking a home in the country (if his rural taste be a
native sentiment, and not a whim), should abjure the
presence of a surly master in the shape of a gardener,

62 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

who can tell him how the Duke of Buccleugh (or any
other) managed such matters.

God manages all of nature's growth and bloom in
such way, that every earnest man with an observant
eye can so far trace the laws of His Providence, as to
insure to himself a harvest of fruit, or grain, or
flowers. And whatever errors may be made are only
so many instructors, to teach, and to quicken love by
their lesson.

Let us not then despair of our friend Lackland,
though his cabbages are burnt, and his beets are
behind the time. I shall visit him again, and trust
that I may find his verbenas and lilies in bloom,
though his larkspurs have been cut down.

A Pig and a Cow.

I PROPOSE an odd horticultural subject ; but the
man who plants a garden, and builds a cottage,
and carries in his thought the hope of shaking off the
dust of the city under green trees upon his own
sward land, where some — nameless party — in white
lawn, with blue ribbon of a sash (as in Mr. Irving's
pretty picture of a wife), stands ready to greet him,
after an hour of torture at the hands of our humane
railroad directors — the man, I say, who looks forward
to all this, and enters upon the experience, thinks,

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 63

sooner or later, of a cow and a pig — the pig to con-
sume the waste growth of his garden, and the cow to
supply such tender food for his growing ones as they
most need.

The pig can hardly be regarded as a classic ani-
mal ; Virgil, indeed, introduces him as crunching
acorns under elm-trees — which account I cannot help
reckoning as apocryphal. But he is a very jolly and
frisky little animal in his young days, not without a
good deal of clumsy grace in his movements, and
showing a most human zeal for the full end of the
trough.

There is almost the same diversity of opinion with
respect to the different races of pigs, which our horti-
cultural friends indulge in with respect to fruits. It
is always an awkward matter to discuss the merits of
different families, whether of animals who talk, or
animals who only grunt or bellow. If the raw sub-
urban resident, in whose interest I make these notes,
has an ambition to rear a prize hog that shall out-
weigh anything his neighbors can show, and intends
to keep his bin full of rank material, I should cer-
tainly advise the great-boned Chester County race,
which, with judicious feeding, come to most elephan-
tine proportions. If, on the other hand, he should
prefer a dapper, snug-jointed beast, that shall not be
particular in regard to food, and which will yield him

64 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

cutlets in which the muscular material shall not be
utterly overlaid and lost in fatty adipose matter, I
should counsel the sleek Berkshire. Or if, uniting the
two, he should desire a delicate limbed, well-rounded,
contented little animal, that shall browse with equa-
namity upon the purslane and the spare beet-tops
from his garden, I know none safer to commend than
the Suffolks. Nor is it essential that he be thorough
bred, since the tokens of pur sang are a red baldness,
and a possible twisting away of the beast's own tail,
which do not contribute to good looks.*

All this is but preparatory to my reply to Lack-
land, who writes to me : " We have voted to have a
pig and a cow ; what kinds shall I get, and how shall
I keep them, and what shall I do with them ? "

And I wrote back to him : " Buy what the dealers
will sell you for a Suffolk ; if he lack somewhat in
purity of blood (as he probably will), don't be punc-
tilious in the matter. Let his sleeping and eating
quarters be high and dry ; and if you can manage
beyond this a little forage ground for him to disport
himself in, and wallow (if he will) on wet days — so
much the better. The forage, if you keep him sup-

* I must drop, in a note, commendatory mention of the Earl of
Sefton Stock, of which a few animals have latterly found their way
to this country — a. trim, sound, long-bodied breed, easy keepers, and
giving, with proper care, delicious rashers of bacon.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 65

plied with raw material in the shape of muck, or old
turfs from your hedge-rows, will add largely to your
compost heap, and in this way he will make up any
possible sacrifice in his flesh. Miss Martineau, I
know, in her ' Two Acre Fanning,' advises severe
cleanliness ; and if the only aim were a roaster for
your table and accumulation of fat, there might be
virtue in the recommendation. But a pig's work
among your turfs is worth half of his pork. He will
thrive very likely upon the waste from your table and
your garden. But, against any possible shortness of
food supply, it were well to provide a bag of what
the grain people will sell you as ' ship stuff ; ' and
this, stirred into the kitchen wash, will make an
unctuous holiday gruel for your little beast, for which
he will be clamorously grateful.

" Again ; the stye should be convenient to the
garden (a hemlock spruce or two will shut off the
sight of it, and a sweet honey-suckle subdue the odors
of it) ; then you may throw over chance bits of purs-
lane, or the suckers from your sweet corn, or a gone-
by salad, and find thanks in the noisy smacking of his
chops. I would not give a fig for a country house
where no such homely addenda are allowed, and
where a starched air of propriety must always reign,
to the complete exclusion of every stray weed, and to
the exclusion of the rollicking Suffolk grunter in it's

66 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

corner, who squeals his entreaty, and declares thanka
with the click-clack of his active jaws.

" He will take on larger and clumsier proportions
month by month, and will be none the worse for the
occasional carding which your zealous Irishman can
afford him in spare hours ; and when, in the month
of October or November, the waste growth of the
garden is abating, and the frost has nipped the bean-
tops, and laid your tomatoes in a black sprawl upon
the ground, your Suffolk (with, say, one or two addi-
tional bags of mixed feed) should be ripe for the
knife.

" My advice, at this conjuncture, would be — sell
him to the butcher. Those who like pig flesh better
would give you rules for cut and curing. But, while
I have considerable respect for the pork family when
fairly afoot and showing grateful appreciation of the
delights of life and of a full trough, I have very little
consideration for the same animals when baked or
stewed. Charles Lamb's pleasant eulogium on roast
pig is one of the most terrible instigators of indiges-
tion that I know ; and I want no better theory for
that charming writer's occasional periods of bitter
despondency, than to suppose him to have dined ' at
seven, sharp,' upon the dish he has so pleasantly and
fearfully extolled.

" I do not mean to say that exception is not to be

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 67

made in favor of a good rasher of bacon at breakfast,
with a fresh egg (from the cock — as a city friend
once suggested in a flow of cheery, rural exuberance) ;
nor do I think anything can be righteously said
against a snug bit of clear pork in a dish of boiled
corned brisket of beef; nay, I would still further
extend the exception to a crisp fry of delicate slices
as an accompaniment of grilled trout, where the latter
fall below a half-pound in weight ; nor do I think
great harm of a thin blanket of the same condiment
to enwrap a roasted quail, or slivers of it to enlard
delicately a fricandeau of veal. But, as for pork
chops, or pork roast, or pork boiled, to be eaten as
the chief piece nutritive of a dinner — it is an abomi-
nation ! Our friends the Jews have not only Scrip-
tural reason in the thing, but reasons physiological.

" And now, my dear fellow, having despatched
your pig (who should be bought for five or six dollars
at seven weeks old, and should be sold at twenty —
from the growth of your garden and a splicing bag
of ship stuff), you will have, if you have used proper
vigilance, some three to four loads of choice compost
to contribute to the vegetable growth of the next
season. There is a notion that manure from such a
source provokes the growth of club-foot in cabbages
and cauliflowers ; but after repeated trials with a
view to fix this averment, I am unable to do so.

68 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Club-foot is not lacking with awkward frequency ;
but appears quite as often, so far as iny experience
goes, with other fertilizers as with that from the pig
stye. A good liming and fresh-turned soil are, so far
as I can determine, the best preventives. Another
precaution, which, in my view, should never be neg-
lected, is to remove and destroy at once all plants
which show symptoms of this ailment.

" The cow is a more tractable subject. Of course,
you wish one that never kicks, that any one can milk,
that will not resent indignities, and will yield you all
the milk and the butter you need, and possibly the
cheese.

" I remember that a city gentleman of great horti-
cultural (and other) ability called upon me not many
years ago, and after descanting upon the absurdity
of planting two acres for a crop which could be easily
grown from half an acre, he asked me how many
quarts of milk my cows averaged per diem ? ' Four-
teen to fifteen quarts,' said I, ' in the flush season.'

" ' But that is very small,' said he ; ' there is no
more reason why you should not have cows giving
twenty to twenty-four quarts a day, than why you
should not have strawberries giving two quarts to
the plant.'

" I was not prepared to gainsay the proposition.
The truth is, I feel a certain awe of distinguished

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 69

horticulturists that blinds me even to their wildest
assertions. What has an humble cultivator to do, or
to say, in the presence of a man who has bagged his
premiums at a New York Horticultural Society, and
is taster ex-officio at the Farmer's Club ?

" I did not argue the matter with him ; I sub-
mitted ; I acknowledged my mediocrity humbly.

" Now, my dear fellow, there are cows which
yield their twenty to twenty-five quarts a day, but
they are very exceptional. Many such, whose private
history I have known, have been fed upon their own
milk with the cream taken off. This involves, as you
will admit, I think, a quick reconversion of capital,
which, with children in the family, is not always
practicable.

" In a general way, I should say, it would be far
safer to count upon an average of twelve to fifteen
quarts per day, even with the best of care. And as
regards your actual purchase of an animal, I dare say
you will have Wall Street friends, who will talk
grandly of the short horns, and suggest some Daisy,
(1397, A. H. B.,) at a cost of six or seven hundred
dollars, and — viewing her pedigree — cheap at that.
My advice to you is, don't buy any such, unless you
intend to turn breeder, and enter the lists with the
herd book people. I say this, not because the short-
horns are not admirable animals ; but admirable ani-

70 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

mals are not always the best domestic animals, — as
some of your recently married friends may possibly
be able to testify.

" But a man who, like yourself, comes to the
country for a leisurely enjoyment of all country boun-
ties, does not wish an animal that must invariably be
kept under the best possible condition ; he Avishes a
docile, adaptable creature. Even a snug native beast
might meet all the ends you would have in view,
without figuring largely upon the cash book.

" Or, still better, a sleek Ayrshire, that shall carry
in her air and horn a little show of better breeding
and full returns to the milk pail. But if you have a
fancy for cream that is fairly golden, and for occa-
sional conversion of excess of milk into a little patk
of golden butter, nothing will suit your purpose bet-
ter than a dainty Alderney, with her fawn-like eyes
and yellow skin.

" I am aware that the short-horn people — who can
see nothing good in a cow, except her figure show
mathematical straightness of line from tail to the set-
ting of her horn — sneer at the comparatively diminu-
tive Alderneys. It is true, moreover, that there may
be in them a hollow of the back, and an undue droop
to the head, and possibly an angular projection of the
hip-bones; but their nose is of the fineness of a
fawn's, their eyes bright and quick as a doe's ; their

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 71

ski a soft and silken, and with a golden hue (if of
good family), which gives best of promise for the
cream-pot. Above all they have a tractability which,
in a domestic pet, is a most admirable quality. * Spot,'
(the black and white Alderney,) the children can
fondle ; she can be tethered to a stake upon the lawn,
and will feed as quietly as if she were in a field of
lucerne : she is grateful for a bonne bouche from the
garden, and takes it from the hand as kindly as a
dog. This docility is a thing of great consequence
upon a little country place where every animal is
made more or less of a pet. It is not every cow that
•will bear tethering upon a lawn ; there are those
indeed who can never be taught to submit to the
confinement. The sleek Alderneys inherit a capacity
for this thing, and I have seen upon the green
orchards near to St. Hiliers, (Isle of Jersey,) scores
of them, each cropping its little circlets of turf as
closely and cleanly as if it had been shorn. In way
of convenience for this service, it is well to have an
old harrow tooth with a ring adjusted to its top,
and revolving freely, upon which ring an iron swivel
should be attached. To such a fixture, easily moved,
and made fast in the ground by a blow or two of a
wooden mallet, a halter may be tied without fear of
any untwisting of the rope, or of any winding up or
other entrapment of the poor beast. I give these

72 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

hints because it is often convenient to furnish a pet
cow, from time to time, some detached feeding ground,
where the shrubbery will not admit of free rambling;
and there are none whose habit is better adapted to
such indulgence upon the lawn than the Alderueys.

" If your cow be kept up constantly for stall-feed-
ing, an earthen floor is desirable, and by all means a
half hour's run in the barn yard of a morning. A
darkened shed will be a great luxury to her in fly
time, and will largely promote the quiet under which
she works out the most bountiful returns from the
succulent food of the garden. A bit of ground in
lucerne — say four rods square (it should be in drills
and kept hoed the first season) — will yield an enor-
mous amount of food material, and if convenient to
the stall, your children will delight in binding it up
in little sheaves for "Moolly." If such a bit of
ground be so situated as to admit of an occasional
sprinkling with liquid manure, five good cuts in a
season may be safely counted on ; nor do I know any
summer herbage which cows love better. Remember
furthermore, that the lucerne, as well as corn fodder,
is improved by a half day's wilting before being
fed. In winter, the carrots and mangel wurtzel will
become available ; both of which any cow may be
taught to love, (if teaching be necessary,) by giving
them a good sprinkling of meal. In the change from

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 73

summer to winter diet, and from winter to summer,
it must be remembered that all sudden changes from
great succulence to dry food, or vice versa, is to be
most cautiously avoided. Lack of care on this score,
is the secret of half the cow ailments.

" If I were to lay down a pleasant and productive
winter dietary for your Alderney, it would be a peck
of sliced roots in the morning, not forgetting a lock
of sweet hay ; at noon, a quart or two of brewer's
grains and fresh water ad libitum / at night, a warm
pailful of drink, into which a quart of coarsely ground
buckwheat meal shall have been stirred, and another
lock of sweet hay in way of nightcap.

" With such food, and an occasional combing, at
the hands of Patrick, (all the better if daily,) I think
you may count upon such golden returns of cream as
will bring back a taste of the grassy spring-time."

Thus much for Lackland's Pig and Cow.

On Gateways.

I HAVE often wondered why the professional
writers on landscape gardening have so little to
say of gateways. Among the more pretentious
authors of this class I find sketches of gate-lodges,
very charming in their details, many of them ; but I

find little or no mention of those modest gates which
4

74 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

must hang at every man's door-yard — those unpre-
tending swinging barriers, by which every country
house-holder is shut off from the world, and by which
he is joined to the world. They may be made to give
a good deal of expression to a place ; they have
almost as much to do with it, in fact, as a man's
mouth has to do with the expression of his face.

There was once a gate called " Beautiful," by
which a lame man lay — we ah1 remember that ; there
was once too a certain " wicketrgate " (with a great
light shining somewhere beyond it) which Evan-
gelist pointed out to Christian, whereby the pilgrim
might enter upon the path to the Celestial City — we
all remember that gate ; and there was another gate,
belonging to our days of roundabouts and satchels, by
which we went out, noon and morning, by which we
returned, noon and evening — on which we swung
upon stolen occasions — a gate whereat we loitered
with other philosophers, in other roundabouts and
with other green satchels, and discussed problems of
marbles, or base-ball, or of the weather, — a gate
through which led the path to the first home ; well, I
think everybody remembers such a gate. And thus
it happens that the subject has a certain poetic and
romantic interest which cannot be wholly ignored,
and which I wonder that the landscapists have so
indifferently treated.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 75

Fancy, if you can, a rural home, — without its gate-
way— lying all abroad upon a common 1 The great
charm of privacy is gone utterly ; and no device of
shrubbery, or hedge, can make good the loss of some
little wicket which will invite approach, and be a
barrier against too easy familiarity. The creak of
the gate-hinge is a welcome to the visitor, and as he
goes out, the latch clicks an adieu.

But there are all sorts of gates, as there are all
sorts of welcomes ; there is, first, your inhospitable
one, made mostly, I should say, of matched boards,
with a row of pleasant iron spikes running along its
top, and no architectural decorations of pilaster or
panel can possibly remove its thoroughly inhospitable
aspect. It belongs to stable-courts or jail-yards, but
never to a home or to a garden.

Again, there are your ceremonious gates, of open-
work indeed, but ponderous, and most times scrupu-
lously closed ; the very opening of them is a fatigu-
ing ceremonial, and there is nothing like a lively wel-
come in the dull clang of their ponderous latches.

Next, there is your simple, unpretending, rural
gate, giving promise of unpretending rural beauties —
homely in all its aspect, and giving foretaste of the
best of homeliness within. And I make a wide dis-
tinction here between the simple rurality at which I
have hinted, and that grotesqueness which is com-

76 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

passed by scores of crooked limbs and knots wrought
into labyrinthine patterns, which puzzle the eye, more

than they please. All crooked things are not neces-
sarily charming, and the better kind of homeliness is
measured by something besides mere roughness.

Lastly, there is your hospitable gate, with its little
rooflet stretched over it, as if to invite the stranger
loiterer to partake at his will of that much of the
hospitalities of the home. Even the passing beggar
gathers his tattered garments under it in a sudden
shower and blesses the shelter. And I introduce upon
the next page a very homely specimen of this class of
gates, which I remember was to be seen many years
ago somewhere in County Kent, England.

Either the sketcher's work was very bad, or else
the engraver has failed to give the character of its
rough rooflet ; which, if I remember rightly, was but

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 77

a thatch of broom, or of sedge. Yet who does not
see written all over it — plain as it is : Loiter if you
like ! Come in, if you like ! And I love to think that

some little maid, under it — in some by-gone year —
said her good-night to some parting Leander. Who
shall laugh at this, that has ever been young ? Are
not the little maids and the Leanders always growing
up about us ? I always felt sure when I found such
covered wickets that no curmudgeon lived within.

A second example of somewhat more orderly pro-
portions, but identical in expression, I take from my
note-book of travel, finding it credited to some little
hamlet of Warwickshire ; the posts and supporting
arms being of unhewn elm, and the roof a neat thatch
of wheat straw, which at the time of my visit was
gray and mossy.

Has not somebody somewhere a cottage home,
whose homeliness would be enforced and beautified
by such a cosy covered wicket of thatch ?

78 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Thatch, indeed, does not take on with us, and

under our climate, that mellow mossiness which be-
longs to it in Devonshire. Our winds are too high
and drying, and the sun too hot. Still, a thatch pro-
perly laid will, with us, keep its evenness for a great
number of years ; and for the benefit of those living
within easy reach of the coast, I may say that nothing
is better for this purpose than the sedge (so called)
of the salt marshes.

In default of thatch, however, very pretty rural
effects may be made by slabs (being log-trimmings
from the saw-mills), or oak bark (which is almost
imperishable), or by scolloped shingles.

An example of the effect of these latter I venture
to give.

In this case, all beneath the roof is of cedar with
the bark undisturbed, while the posts above the roof
are trimmed to a square, tapering and carrying a ball
— the balls and tho tapering extremities of the posts

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND.

79

being a light buff, and the roof red. The effect is
exceedingly good — though it mixes the rustic and

more finished work in a way which the professional
artists do not venture upon. But I have lived long
enough to know that professional traditions in all the
arts — landscape gardening and architecture among
the rest — stand in the way of a great many beauties.
Every country-place wants its special art-garniture
(without respect to traditions) as much as every
pretty face wants its special environment of colors
and of laces. When, therefore, I hear a man declaim
against white gates, or red gates, or rustic gates, or
stone gates, per se, without reference to their position,

8o

OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

or suggestive aims, I condemn him as an iron method-
ist, who apprehends no beauty by intuition, but only
by force of precept.

Perhaps I have myself rather hastily condemned
all close gates, as belonging to stable-courts and jail-
yards. There are situations, certainly, where they
are not only allowable, (as upon back-entrances of
gardens,) but where they contribute eminently to the
air of privacy which must mark every true home.
And I am reminded, in this connection, of a certain
garden-door-way, which I saw near Keightley, in
Yorkshire ; it opened upon a narrow lane in the rear

of the suburban grounds to which it was attached,
and showed such homely, resolute determination to
work up into tasteful shape the stones abounding in
the neighborhood, that I made a rough draught of it
upon the spot.

This picturesque use of rock material is appre-
ciated and practised in many parts of Great Britain.
Thus in the neighborhood of the slate quarries of

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 81

North Wales, near Caernarvon, the refuse material
from the ledges is laid up by the adjoining proprie-
tors in snug fences, that appear at a little distance
away, to be crowned with a regularly castellated bat-
tlement. This effect is produced simply by alternat-
ing cubical and oblong fragments of slate rock upon
the summit of the wall.

In Derbyshire, again, I have seen a kindred effect
wrought by the tasteful disposition of the big boulders
which are scattered pretty thickly over some of the
high moorlands of that country. In Cumberland and
Westmoreland, indications of the same rural adaptive-
ness abound.

Thus much has been suggested at present by our
friend Lackland's request that I should supply for him
the plan of a gate. We will now see what can be
done for his special needs.

Gateways and Rural Carpentry.

/"\N turning back to page of ground plan, the
^-J reader will perceive, from the drawing of my
friend Lackland's grounds, that he has need of three
principal gateways — a small one for the footpath,
being the entrance nearest to the village, a larger
one for his drive, and a third opening for his grass

field. This last he will not have very frequent occa-
4*

82 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

sion to use ; for that reason the gateway should not
t)e very striking, or seem specially to invite entrance.
Supposing that the occupant has availed himself of
the old walls about the premises to build a substan-
tial stone fence along a considerable portion of his
front, I should advise that he mark this field entrance
by two substantial columns built of the same material,
and place between them a gate or movable panel of
fence, constructed of cedar poles, or such other
homely or lasting wood as may be most available.
. I give a rough drawing of what I would propose.

I think that everyone will admit that these col-
umns have a tasteful effect, and add largely to the
architectural character of the wall. And it is a great
mistake to suppose, as many do, that such columns
require hammered stone, or that it is requisite that
they be laid up in mortar, and by an adept in mason-
ry. All that is required is, that stones carrying fairly
developed angles should be laid aside for its con-
struction— that the face of the column should project
three or four inches from the surface of the wall in

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 83

order to mark distinctly its faces, and that it be
bound in firmly, (a thing which the engraver has
omitted to do,) with such long stones as are available.
A boulder sufficiently round to crown the structure
may be found in almost any rod of old country wall ;
and if it be well covered with lichens, so much the
better. The great error in such structures, is in at-
tempting too great nicety, which, by contrast with
the homely farmwork around it, oflends more than it
gratifies. In humble art, as well as in the highest
art, there must be keeping.

But though finical nicety is to be avoided, and
such hammering out of faces, as to increase largely
the expense, and defeat the economy which should
declare itself unmistakably in all rural decoration,
there should be no sacrifice of solidity. A column
that will not stand for years, had better never be
built.

The country wall-layers, ordinarily, are indisposed
to attempt such work, either doubting their own
capacity, or considering it an encroachment upon the
province of the mason. The consequence has been,
in ray own experience, that of some half-dozen or
more which stand here and there about the fields at
Edgewood, every one has been laid up with my own
hands ; and I may aver, with some pride, that after
eight or ten winters of frost, they still stand firmly

84

OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

and compact. One only has lost its capping boulder,
which certain errant hoys could not resist the temp-
tation to tumble off, that they might watch its roll
down a pretty declivity of a hundred rods, or more.
I wish I had no more grievous charges to bring
against errant boys.

For the entrance to the drive-way, supposing that
my friend Lackland has plenty of cedar at hand, I
give another design :

And I have this much to say in favor of it, that a
similar one was erected at Edgewood eleven years
since, and its gates have swung back and forth a
dozen times a day, without, as yet, a single hammer's
stroke in way of repair.

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 85

Two half-inch iron rods were passed through
each gate and fastened by a nut upon the longer up-
right sapling. Once or twice it has been necessary
to give this nut a turn or two with the wrench, and
this completes the tale of the attention it has re-
quired.

The first panel (and part of the second) of the
fence to which it is attached, is given to show its
relation to its surroundings, and the perfect simplicity
of detail which belongs to it. The posts are firm
and cannot swag. The gates are light — perfectly
braced, and held in place by the iron rods which pass
through them. They bid fair to last until the sap
portion of the wood (cedar) is fairly rotted away.
The three horizontal arms are inserted with tenons ;
the braces are fitted only with the gouge, and made
fast with wire nails. And here I wish to enter a
plea for the wire nails, used all over the continent of
Europe, but, as yet, little known with us j though, I
believe, they are to be found in the larger hardware
shops of New York. The advantage of them is, that
they can be driven without splitting the wood — that
they can be clenched effectively, and — what is of
importance in light work — they add very little to the
weight. For the construction of interior rustic work
of twigs and bark they are invaluable. They may
be found of all sizes, from that of a cambric needle

86

OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

(and a half-inch in length) to that corresponding to
our " ten pennies," and lighter by two-thirds than
these.

The third gate is equally simple, and in way of
ornamentation, has only its little rooflet. The de-
sign represents this as of equal width with the
gate ; but a somewhat better effect may be secured
by an extension of the roof some six or eight inches
on either side, in which case, of course, the posts
must be cut off even with the ridge, and finials of
cedar sticks adjusted at either end. This bit of roof
over the gateway gives not only the hospitable air,
which I remarked upon in the previous chapter, but
serves to protect the rustic work from the weather to
such a degree that the bark will hold fast for double
the length of time. In all such work, great annoy-
ance is given by an insect which devours the sapwood

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 87

under the bark, thus loosening the latter, and filling
it with an ugly yellow powder. I have observed, in
my own experience, that the ravages of this insect are
much more decided and constant upon cedar cut in
the winter, than upon such as has been cut in the
growing season of the year. The fact, however, may
be accidental, and I must confess utter ignorance of
the habits and tastes of this disagreeable grub.

The virtue of all such rustic work as I have com-
mented upon, lies in its exceeding simplicity, joined
to great serviceableness. Home repairs do not tell
badly on it ; the joints need not be arranged with
mathematical precision ; the materials are near at
hand and inexpensive ; the creeping vines cling to it
lovingly ; it wears age with a veteran sturdiness.

I am by no means prepared to say that my friend
Lackland will adopt my views on this head. I sus-
pect that bis country or city joiner, when confronted
with the hints I have thrown out in these gate
sketches, (they are really intended for nothing more
than bints), will shake his head doubtfully, and lay
before my friend some stupendous affair of carpentry,
with an infinitude of mouldings, which, to his eye, is
vastly finer. And I shall expect Lackland to yield to
the charm of the rectangular elevations that are set
before him ; or, if he absolutely insists upon the
working up of what stray cedars, or other wood, may

88 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

be about the premises, I shall expect his carpenter to
make such a bugbear of the exuding pitch, and of the
impossibility of bringing his square and his gauge
into requisition, and (if he goes on) to keep so reso-
lutely by a determination to counterfeit, as far as
possible, all the mouldings of his joiner work, that he
will construct a cumbrous affair, at such great cost
of labor, as will disgust my friend Lackland, and at
such cost of simplicity as will disgust every tasteful
observer.

What then ? There can be no doubt of the pos-
sibility of working this unruly material into tasteful
forms, that shaU have practical and economic uses ;
but in the ordering of this matter, as in the ordering
of a great many others, connected with rural life, if
the proprietor can put no zeal into his intention, and
has no eye for the charms of homeliness, let him
abandon the pursuit. A good fence of white pickets,
with gate to match, will keep the pigs out, and the
young Lacklands in.

Village and Country Ho ad-side.

in VERY Christian dweller, in village or in coun-
-* — ^ try, owes a duty to his road-side ; which, if he
neglects, he relapses — horticulturally speaking — into
heathenism. This dutv is to maintain order and neat-

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 89

ness ; and he is no more relieved of this duty because
the highway is assigned over to public uses, than
lie is relieved of any other duty whose accom-
plishment must of necessity contribute to the public
convenience and public education, as well as to his
own. Because my front entry is shared, for all legit-
imate purposes, with my friends and chance callers,
shall I therefore treat it with neglect and allow the
dust and cobwebs to accumulate about it, while I
ensconce myself churlishly in my welt-swept den ?
Yet, every visitor — unless he be a vagabond fruit-
stealer, or an equally vagabond bird-killer — comes up
the road-way: and if you choose to put him through a
course of scoria3, and old tins, and tansy tufts, and
briary heaps of stones along your road-side, you
might as benevolently and as prudently, (so far as the
growing tastes of your children are concerned,) lead
him up to your front door between piles of gaping
clam shells. There is no rule of order, or of taste, or
of benevolence, that belongs to a man's door-yard,
that does not belong to his road-side.

It is true, there is a liability outside the fence to
the incursions of road-menders, who are, for the most
part, barbarians ; but there is no more reason for not
covering or removing the odious traces of these ani-
mals, than for not removing the disagreeable traces
of others. An ugly yellow scar in the turfy mound

90 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

that supports, maybe, your garden wall, by due atten-
tion, and a shovel full or two of fresh mould, can be
thoroughly obliterated ; but if submitted to the
swash of the rains, it gapes and throws off a great
ooze of yellow mud, which, next spring time, tempts
the foraging shovel of the road-menders again, and in
a few years your whole road-side is a disorderly line
of jagged earth-pits, with raw boulders clustering at
the front of each. A little timely care, often repeated,
may at last win upon the regard of the barbarian fol-
lowers of the scraper and hoe, and they may grow
unwittingly into a respect for your love of order
Such miracles are subject of record. A safer alter-
native, however, if your road-side be no more exten-
sive than that of my friend Lackland, is to supply,
at your own cost, an occasional defect in the road-bed
from the screenings of the coal, or the rakings of the
garden, by which you may easily secure so even and
compact a surface, as to escape the attention of the
road viewers. If, on the other hand, the reach be
long, an arrangement can sometimes be made with
town-officials to keep its whole extent in perfect
condition, for a sum which, if it be small, will be
remunerative in the exemption it gives.

Nothing contributes more to an air of thrift
than neat and orderly road-sides ; I would not
urge any finical arrangement of turf, or clipping

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 91

of the road-track, but only such judicious comb-
ing down of unsightly roughnesses, such watchful-
ness against encumbrance, such adaptation of exist-
ing shade trees, or such planting of others, as shall
show that the adjoining proprietor does not limit his
charities by his own walls, or his eye for neatness by
the line of highway.

Once upon a time, when the writer was in search of
a country homestead, he remembers deciding against
certain " strongly recommended " places, because the
highroad to them led through a considerable ar-
ray of suburban houses, whose occupants made it a
religious duty to throw all their offal in the public
street, and to cumber the same locality with their
hoop-poles, or their wood-piles, or their shoe-parings.
It is so hard to unlearn such a noisome depravity of
taste ! Many of the small towns on the banks of the
Hudson (near to New York) and in New Jersey,
offer an extended exhibition of this sort of local econ-
omy and fragrant treasures. And I have sometimes
thought that New York citizens, by reason of the
offal in their streets, become quite agreeably wonted
to such disposition of cast-away bones and filth, and
scent it, upon their drives to their country homes,
with an appetizing relish. But in the name of all
true rural delight, I beg to enter protest, and to urge
every man who has his homestead under green trees,

92 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

to use what influence may lie in him (albeit he is not
select-man) to abate the nuisance, and to make our
village and country road-sides smack of order' and
thrift and cleanliness. Good example will do very
much in way of reform— more, in most instances, than
any zeal of preachment. If you approach an old-
school neighbor, who has inherited the propensity to
cumber the highway before his door with all conceiv-
able odds and ends, with any suggestions for a change
on the score of neatness or good looks, you will find
him, very likely, fortified with his own " idees " on
that subject — "idees," which, like the independent
American citizen that he is, he is in no mood to
relinquish.

" He can't git a livin by looks," and with such
speech shrewdly uttered, and emphasized with a rat-
tling horse-laugh, he floors your blandest sugges-
tions. Yet a wholesome attention to neatness on
your own score, which shall creep up to the edge of
his enclosures, and work by contrast, will in time
operate insensibly upon him. — There is something
after all " very catching " in good order.

But most of all, the co-operation of all the town's
people, who are disposed to neatness, is to be relied
upon. Every country place of any size should have
its " village-improvement society," to look after the
planting of shade trees, the proper condition of high-

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 93

ways, the arrest of stray cattle, and to discuss and
carry into execution whatever may promote the thrift
and attractive appearance of the place, — whether in
the way of new streets, laying down of side-walks,
or removal of offensive debris or noxious weeds. I
commend most heartily to Lackland the instigation
and establishment of such a society. And if such a
club could have their little room for occasional meet-
ing, and stock it with a few valuable horticultural
and agricultural books and papers, so much the
better. An entirely new air might be given to very
many of our slatternly country villages in a few years,
by the energetic operations of such a club, and the
value and attractiveness of property be correspond-
ingly increased.

Most of the North-eastern States have, within a
few years, by legislative enactment, outlawed all
strolling cattle. This is well, and relieves from a
great nuisance. But in not a few broad-streeted
towns there has sprung up in consequence, a rank
growth of weeds, (formerly kept down by grazing
cows,) which, as it seems no individual's concern, are
allowed to ripen their seeds, thus multiplying next
year's labor in the fields, besides offering a terribly
straggling appearance. In fault of such co-operative
club as I have hinted at, (which should order them
cut at common expense,) every man should see to his

94 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

own frontage. If such nursery beds had not been
tolerated, we should long ago, I think, have scotched
the Canada thistle, if not that detestable weed, the
wild carrot.

At a considerable remove from towns, we fre-
quently come upon some quiet streak of country road,
charmingly bordered with a wild sylvan tangle of
hickories, sumacs, brambles, cedars, and all festooned
perhaps with the tendrils of the wild grape, or the
bittersweet. Neither economy or good taste com-
mand the removal of these, even when bordering cul-
tivated fields, except (which rarely occurs) they har-
bor bad weeds to spread within the enclosure. Nay,
in nine cases in ten they furnish, a grateful shelter
from the winds, — a matter too little appreciated as
yet, either by fruit growers or grain growers. And
on the score of taste, no more charming contrast can
be devised than that of such wild profusion of growth,
with the neat and orderly array of crops beyond. I
can recall no more delightful rural scenes in England,
tibc certain ones in Devonshire, where, after strolling
along some admirable bit of Macadam, with high
hedge-rows on either side, sprinkled with primroses,
and tasselled with nodding ferns, and wild with tangled
thickets of bramble, I have, with a leap, broken
through and seen beyond, — so near the road I could
have tossed my hat into the field, — such trim lines

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 95

of emerald wheat, — without ever a weed or a crook,
— as made the heart rejoice. The high hedge-rows
are indeed now being cut down throughout the best
cultivated districts, but only for the economy of land,
the surface occupied being needed. But while we
have country roads from five to six rods wide, the
same objection does not obtain with us. Observe
again, I beg, that I do not counsel the planting of any
such road-side tangles, or indeed the sparing of them,
when any better use can be made of the land. I only
plead for their continued presence in place of a rude
hurly-burly of stubs and harsh boulders, to which
condition many farmers reduce them, and call it a
judicious " slicking up."

I have run widely away from the little homestead
of my friend Lackland ; so widely indeed, that I shall
not soon encounter him again. Whenever that may
be, I trust I may hear that his pelargoniums are all
a-bloom — that his pig and his cow are thriving — hie
road-side in order, — his Patrick a jewel of a man, and
that all rural felicities attend him.

NOTE. — I have used the term ' ' Alderney " cattle, as ap-
plying in the old sense to all cattle of Channel Island descent:
though, as a matter of fact, we rarely encounter any true
"Alderneys." The talk nowadays is of Jerseys and Guern-
seys.

m.

WA Y-SIDE HINTS.

WA Y-SIDE HINTS.

Talk about Porches.

A COUNTRY house without a porch is like a
man without an eyebrow ; it gives expression,
and gives expression where you most want it. The
least office of a porch is that of affording protection
against the rain-beat and the sun-beat. It is an inter-
preter of character ; it humanizes bald walls and
windows ; it emphasizes architectural tone ; it gives
hint of hospitality ; it is a hand stretched out (figura-
tively and lumberingly, often) from the world within
to the world without.

At a church door even, a porch seems to me to be
a blessed thing, and a most worthy and patent
demonstration of the overflowing Christian charity,
and of the wish to give shelter. Of all the images of
wayside country churches which keep in my mind,

ioo OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

those hang most persistently and agreeably, which
show their jutting, defensive rooflets to keep the
brunt of the storm from the church-goer while he yet
fingers at the latch of entrance.

I doubt if there be not something beguiling in a
porch over the door of a country shop — something
that relieves the odium of bargaining, and imbues
even the small grocer with a flavor of cheap hospitali-
ties. The verandas (which is but a long translation
of porch) that stretch along the great river front
of the Bellevue Hospital, diffuse somehow a gladsome
cheer over that prodigious caravansary of the sick ;
and I never see the poor creatures in their bandaged
heads and their flannel gowns enjoying their conva-
lescence in the sunshine of those exterior corridors,
but I reckon the old corridors for as much as the
young doctors, in bringing them from convalescence
into strength, and a new fight with the bedevilments
of the world.

What shall we say, too, of inn porches ? Doep
anybody doubt their fitness ? Is there any question
of the fact — with any person of reasonably imagina-
tive mood — that Falstaff and Nym and Bavdolph.
and the rest, once lolled upon the benches of the
porch that overhung the door of the Boar's Head
Tavern, Eastcheap ? Any question about a porch,
and a generous one, at the Tabard, Southwark — pre-

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 101

sided over by that wonderful host who so quickened
the story-telling humors of the Canterbury pilgrims
of Master Chaucer ?

Then again, in our time, if one were to peel away
the verandas and the exterior corridors from our vast
watering-place hostelries, what an arid baldness of
wall and of character would be left ! All sentiment,
all glowing memories, all the music of girlish foot-
falls, all echoes of laughter and banter and rollicking
mirth, and tenderly uttered vows would be gone.

King David, when he gave out to his son Solomon
the designs for the building of the Temple, included
among the very first of them (1 Chron. xxviii. 11)
the " pattern of a porch." It is not, however, of
porches of shittim-wood and of gold that I mean to
talk just now — nor even of those elaborate architec-
tural features which will belong of necessity to the
entrance-way of every complete study of a countiy
house. I plead only for some little mantling hood
about every exterior door-way, however humble.

There are hundreds of naked, vulgar-looking
dwellings, scattered up and down our country high-
roads, which only need a little deft and adroit adap-
tation of the hospitable feature which I have made
the subject of this paper, to assume an air of modest
grace, in place of the present indecorous exposure of
a wanton.

102 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

But let no one suppose that porch-building, as
applied to the homely lines of a staid old house of
thirty or fifty years since, can be safely given over to
the judgment of our present ambitious carpenters.
Ten to one, they will equip a barren simplicity with
an odious tawdriness. A town-bred girl will slip
into the millinery bedizenment of the town haber-
dasher without making show of any odious incon-
gruity ; but let some buxom, round-cheeked, stout-
ankle d lass of the back country adopt the same, and
we laugh at the enormity. In the same way, every
man of a discerning taste must smile derisively at the
adornment of an unpretentious farm-house with the
startling decorative features of the shop joinery of
the day — the endless scroll-work (done cheaply, by
new methods of machine sawing) — the portentous
moulding — the arches, whose outlines are from By-
zantium or the new Louvre — columns whose propor-
tions are improved from the Greeks — capitals whose
fretting sculpture outranks the acanthus. Seriously,
I think the carpenters, if left to their own efflo-
rescence, nowadays, will out-match the loudest ex-
travagances of the milliners. "We seem to have
drifted into an epoch of the largest and crudest
flamboyance — in morals, in brokerage, and in car-
pentry. A sober, simple-minded man is worse than
lost amongst the new brood of architectural im-
provers.

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 103

Notwithstanding all this, I venture to plead for a
wholesome severity of taste ; if simple material is to
be dealt with, it should be dealt with simply. If we
have a homely old-style house to modify and render
attractive, do not let us make its modification a
mockery by the blazon of Chinese scroll-work. There
is a way of dealing with what is old, in keeping with
what is old, and of dealing with what is homely, in
keeping with what is homely. A sensible middle-
aged lady of the old school, if she have occasion to
present herself afresh in society, and assert her pre-
rogatives once more, will not surely do so by tying
tow-bags at the back of her head and widening her
skirts indecorously. But she will bring her old man-
ner with her, and so equip the old manner by the
devices of a judicious art that we shall wonder and
admire in spite of ourselves.

In illustration of my views about homely porches,
I venture to give upon the next page a rough drawing
of one of the plainest conceivable. It is a sort of cross
between the Dutch stoop and the lumbering rooflet
which in old times overhung many a doorway of a
New England farm-house. It offers shelter and rest ;
it is in no way pretentious ; it declares its character
at a glance ; you cannot laugh at it for any air of
assumption that it carries; you can find no such
shapen thing in any of the architectural books.

104

OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

What then ? Must it needs be condemned for this
reason ?

I do not, indeed, commend it for any beauty, per
se, but as being an honest, well-intended shelter and
resting-place, which could be grafted upon many an

^f.xf«y-<f:^f^-"^s-_ .- >- ;NT~: s.

old-style farm-house, with bare door, and set off its
barrenness, with quaint, simple lines of hospitality,
that would add more to the real effect of the home
than a cumbrous series of joiner's arches of tenfold its
cost. In the door itself I have dropped a hint of
many an ancient door which confronts the high-road
in a score of New England villages. People do not
instruct their carpenters to build such doors now ;
yet I can conceive of worse ones, glazed up and

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 105

down, with blue and yellow and green glass, in most
irritating conjunction. I do not know that I would
absolutely advise the building of those ancient divided
doors with their diamond " lights ; " but wherever
they show their quaint faces, looking out tranquilly
upon the clash and turmoil of our latter half of the
century, I would certainly cherish them ; or if I hung a
porch over them, it would be such a one as should be
in keeping with their quaintness, and yet offer all
promise — which a sensible porch should offer — of
shelter and rest. There is a village I never pass
through but I ache to clap over one or more of its
old-time doors (now battling without vestige of roof-
let, with sun and rain) some such quaint, overhang-
ing beacon of hospitality as I have pictured ; I am
sure the houses would take on a double homeliness,
and I should think of all the inmates as growing
thenceforth, every day, more kindly, and every day
mellower in their charities.

I next give a sketch of a little stone porch, which,
if I do not mistake, is taken from some stone cottage
in Cumberland County, England. It belongs, certain-
ly, by its whole air and by its arrangement, to a
country where stones of good, straight-splitting qual-
ity (such as gneiss) are plentiful, and are used for
unpretending cottage architecture. It would seem to
have pertained to a house of very modest character
5*

106 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

and to one whose position and exposure demanded
special shelter. I think it may offer a hint, at least,
of the proper use of similar material in our country.
We have not half learned yet all that may be accom-
plished in domestic architecture, with the wealth of
stones scattered over our fields. Dear lumber is
teaching us somewhat ; but necessity will presently
teach us more. The great cost of mason-work is in
the way of any present large use of stone for building
purposes, least of all such purpose as a cottage porch.
But with straight-cleaving stone at hand, such a
porch as I have drawn could be put together, with
all its real effect (though not perhaps a great nicety),
by common wall-layers ; and it is for this reason I
have introduced it, hoping that some intelligent pro-

prietor who is in the neighborhood of quarries will
put his hands to the task of imitation.

WAY-SIDE HINTS.

107

I give still another design copied rudely from
an actual porch at Ambleside (Westmoreland) ; it
was shading the door, some fifteen years since, oJ

a village curate. There were vines clambering over
it, which I have omitted, in order to give a full idea
of the simplicity of its construction. I know it is the
way of the grand architects to sneer at all rustic
work as child's play ; but I cannot see the pertinence
of their sneers ; it is quite true that rustic work will
not last forever — neither will we ; house-holders and
architects, and all the rest of us, have the worms
gnawing at our vitals, and the bark falling away, and

io8 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the end corning swift. But a good, stanch tree trunk,
cut in its best season (late autumn), is a very toler-
able sort of God's work, and, seems to me, can be put
to very picturesque uses. I don't think the curate's
porch is a bad one ; as a hint for better ones, I think
it is specially good.

Upon the question of the use of right material for
rustic work, there is very much to be said ; here, I
have only space for a suggestion or two. There are
some trees which hold their bark wonderfully well ;
of such is the sassafras, which, after its tenth year,
takes on a picturesque roughness and a rhinoceros-
like thickness of skin, which admirably fits it for
rustic use. The white ash, assuming after fifteen
years a similar thickness of outer covering, holds its
coat with almost equal tenacity. The ordinary " pig-
nut " hickory holds its bark well ; the oak does not ;
neither does the chestnut. The cedar is perhaps most
commonly employed for rustic decoration ; cut in the
proper season, and due precaution being taken, by
coating of oil or varnish, against the ravages of the
grubs (which have an uncommon appetite for the
sap wood of cedar), it may hold its shaggy epidermis
for a long time. I would suggest to those using it
for architectural purposes a wash of crude petroleum ;
it is a wash that, so far as I know, is proof against
the appetite of all insects. Its objectionable odor

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 109

soon passes away. Very many of the smooth-barked
trees, such as beech, birch, maple, and sycamore, will
hold their bark firmly if precautions be taken to
exclude the air by varnishing the ends and all such cuts
as have been made by the excision of a limb. Old
and slow-growing wood will, it must be observed,
have less shrinkage, and maintain a better bark sur-
face, than young saplings or trees of rapid growth.
But, irrespective of all questions of durability, is
there not something rurally attractive in this unpre-
tending porch, whose columns have come from, the
forest, and whose overarching arms are the arms that
overarch God's temples of the wood ? Not lacking,
surely, some elements of the beautiful in itself; and
at the door of a village clergyman, with the ivy show-
ing its glossy leaflets in wealthy labyrinth, and the
convolvulus twining up at the base upon whatever
vine-hold may offer, and handing out its purple chali-
ces to catch the dews of the morning — is there noth-
ing to be emulated in this? Let those who love
Nature's simplest graces, answer.

On Not Doing All at Once.

THERE are a great many ardently progressive
people who will be shocked by the caption
under which I write. The current American theory

i io OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

is, that if a thing needs to be done, it should be done
at once, — with railroad speed, no matter whether it
regards politics, morals, religion, or horticulture. And
I wantonly take the risk of being condemned for an
arrant conservative, when I express my belief that
there are a great many good objects in life which
are accomplished better by gradual progression to-
ward them than by sudden seizure. I shall not stay
to argue the point with respect to negro suffrage, or
female suffrage, or a temperance reformation, or the
clearing out of Maximilian's Mexican Imperialism —
which are a little removed from the horticultural
arena, where our humbler questions are discussed —
but I shall urge a graduation and culmination of
triumphs in what relates to rural life and its charms.

One meets, from time to time, with a gentleman
from the city, smitten with a sudden rural fancy, who
is in eager search for a place " made to his hand,"
with the walks all laid down, the entrance-ways es-
tablished, the dwarf trees regularly planted, the con-
servatory a-steam, and the crocheted turrets fretting
the sky-line of the suburban villa. But I never heard
of any such seeker after perfected beauties who was
an enthusiast in country pursuits, or who did not
speedily grow weary of his phantasy. He may take
a pride in his cheap bargain ; he may regale himself
with the fruits and enjoy the vistas of his arbor ; but

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 111

he has none of that exquisitely-wrought satisfaction
which belongs to the man who has planted his own
trees, who has laid down his own walks, and who
has seen, year after year, successive features of beauty
in shrub, or flower, or pathway, mature under his
ministering hand, and lend their attractions to the
cumulating charms of his home. The man of
capital, who buys into an established business,
where the system is perfected, the trade regular
and constant, the details unvaried, may very pos-
sibly congratulate himself upon the security of his
gains ; but he knows nothing of that ardent and in-
toxicating enthralment which belongs to one who
has grown up with the business — suggested its en-
terprises— shared its anxieties, and by thought, and
struggle, and adventure, made himself a part of its
successes.

A man may enjoy a little complacency in wearing
the coat of another, (if he gets it cheap,) but there
can hardly be much pride in it. Therefore, I would
say to any one who is thoroughly in earnest about
a country home — make it for yourself. Xenophon,
who lived in a time when Greeks were Greeks,
advised people in search of a country place to buy
of a slatternly and careless farmer, since in that
event they might be sure of seeing the worst,
and of making their labor and care work the lar-

112 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

gest results. Cato,* on the other hand, who rep-
resented a more effeminate and scheming race,
advised the purchase of a country home from a
good farmer and judicious house-builder, so that the
buyer might be sure of nice culture and equipments,
— possibly at a bargain. It illustrates, I think, rather
finely, an essential difference between the two races
and ages : — the Greek, earnest to make his own brain
tell, and the Latin, eager to make as much as he could
out of the brains of other people.

I must say that I like the Greek view best. I
never knew of an enthusiast in any pursuit, — whether
grape-growing, or literature, or ballooning, or poli-
tics,— who did not find his chiefest pleasure in fore-
casting successes, not yet made, but only dimly con-
ceived of, and ardently struggled for. The more
enthusiasm, the more evidence, I should say, in a
general way, of incompletion and apparent confusion.

Show me a cultivator whose vines are well
trained by plumb and line, whose trees are every one
planted mathematically in quincunx order, whose
dwarfs are all clipped and braced after the best pyra-
midal pattern, and I feel somehow that he is a fash-
ionist, that he reposes upon certain formulas beyond

* I shall make no apology for the introduction of these two
heathen names, since both authors have written capitally well on
subjects connected with husbandry and rural life.

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 113

which he does not think it necessary to explore. But
where I see, with an equal degree of attention, irreg-
ularity and variety of treatment, — tendrils a-droop
and fruit-spurs apparently neglected, — I am not un-
frequently impressed with the belief that the cultiva-
tor is regardless of old and patent truths, because
their truth is proven, arid because his eye and mind
are on the strain toward some new development.

When a good, kind horticultural gentleman takes
me by the button-hole, and tells me by the hour of
what length it is necessary to cut the new wood in
order to insure a good start for the buds at the base,
and how the sap has a tendency to flow strongest into
the taller shoots, and other such truisms, which have
been in the books these ten years, I listen respect-
fully, but cannot help thinking, — " my dear good sir,
you will never set the river a-fire."

Nor indeed do we want the river set on fire ; but
we want progress. And all I have said thus far is
but preliminary to the truth on which I wish to insist,
— that a graduated progress is essential to all rational
enjoyment, whether in things rural, Christian, or com-
mercial.

And for this reason I allege that all things which
are proper to be done about a country house, are not
to be done at once. Half the charm of life in such a
home is in every week's and every season's succeed-

ii4 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

ing developments. If, for instance, my friend Lack
land, whose place I have described in previous pages,
had found a landscape gardener capable of inaugurat-
ing all the changes I have described, and had estab-
lished his garden, his mall, his shrubberies, and had
made the cliff in the corner nod with its blooming
columbines, within a month after occupation, and
established his dwarf pears in full growth and fruit-
age, there may have been a glad surprise ; but the
very completeness of the change would have left no
room for that exhilaration of spirits, with which we
pursue favorite aims to their attainment. No trout-
fisher, who is worthy the name, wants his creel
loaded in the beginning ; he wants the pursuit — the
alternations of hope and fear ; the coy rest of his fly
upon this pool — the whisk of its brown hackle down
yonder rapid — its play upon the eddies where possi-
bly some swift strike may be made — the sway of his
rod, and the whiz of his reel under the dash of some
struggling victim.

It is a mistake, therefore, I think, to aim at the
completion of a country home in a season, or in two,
or some half a dozen. Its attractiveness lies, or
should lie, in its prospective growth of charms. Your
city home — when once the architect, and plumber,
and upholsterer have done their work — is in a sense
complete, and the added charms must lie in the genial

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 115

socialities and hospitalities with which you can invest
it ; but with a country home, the fields, the flowers,
the paths, the hundred rural embellishments, may be
made to develop a constantly recurring succession of
attractive features. This year, a new thicket of shrub-
bery, or a new gate-way on some foot-path ; next
year, the investment of some out-lying ledge with
floral wonders ; the season after may come the estab-
lishment of a meadow (by judicious drainage) where
some ugly marsh has offended the eye ; and the suc-
ceeding summer may show the redemption of the
harsh briary up-land that you have scourged into
fertility and greenness. This year, a thatched rooflet
to some out-lying stile ; next year, a rustic seat under
the trees which have begun to oifer a tempting shade.
This year, the curbing of the limbs of some over-
growing poplar ; and next year — if need be — a lop-
ping away of the tree itself to expose a fresher
beauty in the shrubbery beneath.

Most planters about a country home are too much
afraid of the axe ; yet judicious cutting is of as much
importance as planting ; ' and I have seen charming
thickets shoot up into raw, lank assemblage of boles
of trees without grace or comeliness, for lack of cour-
age to cut trees at the root. For all good effects of
foliage in landscape gardening — after the fifth year —
the axe is quite as important an implement as the

Ii6 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

spade. Even young trees of eight or ten years
growth which stool freely — (such as the soft maple,
birch, chestnut, and locust,) when planted upon de-
clivities, may often be cut away entirely, with the
assurance that the young sprouts, within a season,
will more than supply their efficiency. Due care,
however, should be taken that such trees be cut
either in winter or in early spring, in order to ensure
free stooling, or (as we say) sprouting. The black
birch, which I have named, and which is a very beau-
tiful tree — not as yet, I think, fairly appreciated by
our landscapists — will not stool with vigor, if cut
after it has attained considerable size ; but the sap-
lings of three or four years, if cut within a foot of
the ground, will branch off into a rampant growth of
boughs, whose fine spray, even in the winter, is
almost equal to its glossy show of summer foliage.

I do not know if I have made my case clear ; but
what I have wished has been to guard purchasers,
who are really in earnest, against being disturbed or
rebuffed by the rough aspect of such country places
as commend themselves in other respects. The sub-
jugation of roughness, or rather, the alleviation of it
by a thousand little daintinesses of treatment, is what
serves chiefly to keep alive interest in a country
homestead.

I must say, for my own part, that I enjoy often

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 117

for months together some startling defect in my
grounds — so deep is my assurance, that two days of
honest labor will remove it all, and startle on-lookers
by the change.

But let no rural enthusiast hope to up-root all the
ill-growth, or to smooth all the roughnesses in a year.
He would be none the happier if he could. We find
our highest pleasure in conquest of difficulties. And
he who has none to conquer, or does not meet them,
must be either fool or craven.

Ploughing and Drilled Crops.

ONE of the most striking of those contrasts which
arrest the attention of an intelligent agricul-
tural observer, between the tillage of English fields
and those of New England, as well as of America
generally, is in the matter of plowing. In England,
bad plowing is rare ; in New England, good plowing
is even rarer. Something is to be allowed, of course,
for the irregular and rocky surface of new lands, but
even upon the best meadow bottoms along our river
courses, a clean, straight furrow, well turned, so as to
offer the largest possible amount of friable mould for
a seed-bed, is a sight so unusual, that in the month of
spring travel we might count the number on our
fingers. I go still farther, and say — though doubtless

ii8 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

offending the patriotic susceptibilities of a great
many — that not one American farmer in twenty knows
what really good plowing is. Over and over, the
wiseacres at the county fairs give their first pre-
miums to the man who, by a little deft handling of
the plow, can turn a flat furrow, and who wins his
honors by his capacity to hide every vestige of the
stubble, and to leave an utterly level surface. But a
flat furrow, with ordinary implements, involves a
broad cut and a consequent diminution of depth.
The perfection of plowing upon sward-land implies, on
the contrary, little pyramidal ridgelets of mould, run-
ning like an arrow's flight the full length of the field,
— all which a good cross-harrowing will break down
into fine and even tilth, like a garden-bed. Yet again
and again, I have seen such plowing, by Scotch
adepts, condemned by the county wise men for its
unevenness. The flat furrow is not, indeed, without
its uses under certain conditions of the land, and with
special objects in view — as, for instance, where, by a
fall plowing, one wishes a partial disintegration of
the turf, in view of a " turning under " of the whole
surface upon the succeeding spring for a crop of
roots. This is practised upon the island of Jersey (so
famous for its dairy stock) with great success. The
sod is " skimmed " (such is their term) in the month
of November or December, and with the opening of

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 119

spring all is turned under by a plow, which, so far as
I have observed, is peculiar to that island, and which
works ten inches in depth, and requires a team of
four horses for its effective use.

I must have a word or two to say here in regard
to American plows, which, from the fact that they
have received occasional commendatory prizes from
foreign committees, have been counted by the san-
guine superior to all other implements of the name,
and gushing orators have lavished brilliant periods
upon our superiority to the world in this branch of
agricultural mechanism. Nothing surely can exceed
the best American plows in their adaptation to present
American needs. They are light, compact, strong,
and in rough lands are by half more manageable than
the best English implements. But supposing a great
reach of well-tilled and perfectly cleared field, and
the improved iron Scotch plow will lay a far more
true and even furrow with one half the expendi-
ture of manual force. Under such circumstances, the
great weight of the Scotch implement., added to its
carefully adjusted poise, counts in its favor. We shall
gain nothing by denying this and by exaggerating
the value of our wooden framework, which has been
suggested at once by the cheapness of timber material
and by the exigencies of a rough country. Nor have
I any manner of doubt that as our culture ripens into

120 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

seizure of all economic methods, our implement
makers will adapt themselves to the new demands
with that shrewdness which has thus far been so
characteristic of their efforts.

Again, we have no regularly educated plowmen
in America. Every man who fai'ms five acres of land
thinks he can plow — nay, he is in doubt if anybody
in the world can do it better. But good plowing is
a thing of education, as much as good preaching, or
carpentering, or shoemaking, or writing. Nothing
but experience gives the final and effective hand-
ling. With the wonderful division of labor in all
old countries, every agricultural laborer has his special
province and domain of work. And it is quite absurd
to suppose that a man who plows only a month out of
the twelve can have anything like that due knowledge
of the craft, which one acquires by handling the plow-
stilts every day, for a hundred days in succession. It
is quite true that under a European sky — whether of
Belgium, France, or England — tillage can be carried
on far into the winter, and that, therefore, there is
more occasion that a man be educated for the special
office of plowing. But whatever occasion may be,
the fact remains the same that, while in Belgium and
in Great Britain there is an annual crop of appren-
tices to the plow, in America there is none. Every
man who can use a hoe or a pitch-fork is supposed to

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 121

be a competent talisman for the plow. The result is
— very much bad work. And I would respectfully
suggest as a subject to which the newly inaugurated
Agricultural Colleges may fitly turn a portion of their
attention, the indoctrination of a certain number of
ambitious young farmers (every fall time) into the
merits of good plowing. It is not indeed to be ex-
pected that the purveyors of this Congressional agri-
cultural charity would, in most instances, be capable
personally of giving the requisite instruction ; but
they might avail themselves of the offices of here
and there a Scotch farmer who would be competent
to fulfil the trust, and there are always young Ameri-
cans willing to learn.

Another noticeable feature in European field man-
agement, which contrasts strongly with much of
our helter skelter planting, is the almost universal
adoption of the drill system in the culture of all hoed
crops, by virtue of which fertilizing material is ap-
plied directly to the plants, and the same distributed
— by a transverse plowing the succeeding season — for
the benefit of the cereal which comes next in rota-
tion. It may be questionable if our corn crop (maize)
will not succeed best under so-called " hill " culture,
and with a broadcast application of manure, since it
is a gross and wide feeder, and demands full flow of
sun and air ; but in respect to most other hoed crops
6

122 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

there can be no doubt of the superior economy, as
well as the more orderly appearance of the drill
system.

Take for instance our ordinary crop of potatoes,
(and I think the details of its management were never
before subject of discussion in a similar context ;) four
out of ten patches of this worthy esculent, are, in
New England soil, put down in wavy lines of hills —
irregular in distance, slatternly in culture, and yet
involving per bushel a far larger expense for tillage
and harvesting, than if dressed, planted, cleaned, and
earthed up according to some system which would
demand trim lines, even distances, and a complete
shading of the whole ground in the season of their
most rampant growth. Perhaps I shall not be counted
too intolerably practical, if I indicate the actual
method of procedure which has been sometimes fol-
lowed under my own observation. We will suppose
that a good surface of sward-land (requiring a lift by
reason of its weediness) is turned over lightly, (and
flatly, if you please,) in the month of October. Noth-
ing offers better pabulum for potatoes, or indeed
almost any crop, than decaying turf. In April the
raw surface is levelled with a light Scotch harrow,
and thereupon all is turned under seven inches by the
best plow at command with three horses abreast;
(two will weary of the work.) After this the harrow

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 123

is put on again, up and down, and across. There is
no fear of harrowing too much. This being accom-
plished, and the manure disposed (since March) in
huge heaps at either end of the field, three deep fur-
rows are opened at, say, two to three rods apart, by
a plowman who can drive his furrow across as straight
as the flight of an arrow. Immediately upon the
opening of the first, the cart follows, and two men
strew the open furrow with the half-rotted manure.
Another hand follows with a sprinkling of guano and
plaster : and still another follows to drop the seed.
Upon this the plowman laps a furrow in way of
cover : two furrows follow as in ordinary plowing,
and every fourth one is treated as we have described
with ample dressing and seed. Three series of fur-
rows being opened at the start, permit the plowman
to go his rounds without interfering with the plant-
ing and dressing. When the whole field is gone over
after this system it has simply the appearance of a
thoroughly plowed surface. Nothing more is done
until the young shoots begin to appear ; at this time
the Scotch harrow is put on, and the land completely
weeded and levelled, little or no harm being done by
this procedure to the starting crop. The whole field
has thus the evenness and the cleanness of a garden.
Three weeks later, especially if the season be favor-
able to weed growth, it may be necessary to go be-

124 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

tween the rows — now most distinctly and luxuriantly
marked with tufts of green — with the cultivator; and
no future culture is needed until the " earthing-
up " process is accomplished with a double-mould-
board plow. This done, the crop takes care of itself
until harvesting time ; no hand hoe, or further culture
being essential. I venture to say that the cost per
bushel is twenty per cent, less than that by the ordi-
nary, hap-hazard hand tillage. In addition to this
there is the delight to the eye of trim rows of luxu-
riant foliage, interlacing by degrees, and covering the
whole surface with a rich mat of green. If the
experts in the growth of this old esculent — whether
in Maine or on the Bergen flats — have any fault to
find with the method, I will be a patient listener.

Heads and Shade.

I LEAVE potatoes and their culture for a further
consideration of the more striking contrasts be-
tween European and American landscape. Not the
least noticeable of these contrasts springs from the
vast difference in the outlay and treatment of the
public roads. A neat and well-ordered public road
in any of the rural districts of America is altogether
exceptional. Throughout Great Britain a slatternly
and ill-kept one is most rare. There is no particular

WAY- SIDE HINTS. 125

reason why a cross-country road for farm traffic only,
should have the width of a village street ; yet one
uniform turnpike rule of breadth seems to have pre-
vailed in the laying down of all countiy thorough-
fares in America : of course, did the disposition exist,
it would by no means be so easy a matter to keep a
rambling highway of forty or fifty feet in width, in
such orderly condition as a narrower one which would
amply suffice for the traffic. Neither towns nor tarn-
pike companies, who mostly have American roads in
charge, have any system in their management or any
regard for appearances. Exception is to be made in
favor of a few public-spirited townships (in Massa-
chusetts mostly) which have taken this matter boldly
in hand and encouraged order and thrift by whole-
some regulations in regard to encroachments upon
the highway, and the judicious planting of trees.
For the most part, however, American highroads,
throughout the rural districts, offer to the eye two
great slovenly stretches of land, cumbered with stones,
offal, wood-yards, and gaping with yellow chasms of
earth, from which, every spring-time and autumn, a
few shovelfuls of clay are withdrawn to patch the
road-bed which lies between. Under such conditions
the utmost neatness and regularity which the farmer
may bestow upon his fields and crops lose half their
effect, and the landscape lacks that completed charm

126 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

which regales the eye along the rural by-roads of
England.

While town authorities continue to be appointed
for their political aptitude, it is useless to hope for
any mending of such defects, or for any deliberate
scheme of improvement. The most that can be done
is by the combination of adjoining proprietors, in
which they will have little to hope from the coopera-
tion of any town board of advisers. As an instance
in point — I have repeatedly offered to undertake full
charge of the half-mile of highroad leading through
farm lands of my own, guaranteeing a more serviceable
condition than the road has yet known, and a dimi-
nution of cost to the town of at least twenty per
cent., yet the proposition is ignored. The officials
would lose their little private jobbing in way of
repairs, and some future board might annul any such
disorderly and unheard of contract.

I have alluded to the planting of trees along high-
ways— a practice which many towns have favored by
public action, and one contributing largely to the
enjoyment of a summer's drive, as well as adding to
the inviting aspect of our country villages. The same
practice obtains along the great public highways of
France, but not so generally in England where the
sunshine is not so common or so fierce as to call for
special protection. Even the country houses of Great

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 127

Britain are by no means so shaded as our own ; and
the most considerable piles of buildings, snch as Eaton
Hall, Blenheim, Dalkeith, and Burghley House, have
hardly a noticeable tree within stone's throw of their
walls. The flower patches, and coppices of shrubbery
approach more nearly, and to the garden fronts of
those magnificent homes you walk through walls of
blooming shrubs. But the full flow of the sunshine
upon the window is a thing courted. Allowing for
all difference in climate, I think there jnay be a ques-
tion if we do not err in this country by over-much
shading. A cottage in a wood is a pretty subject for
poetry, but it is apt to be uncomfortably damp. And
there are village streets with us so embowered that
scarce a ray of sunshine can play fairly upon the roofs
or fronts of the village houses, from June to October.
A summer's life under such screen cannot contribute
to the growth of roses in the cheeks any more than
to the growth of roses at the door. There is no pro-
vision against agues — whether moral or physical —
like a good flow of sunshine.

In the establishment of new country houses with
us I often observe infinite pains bestowed upon the
elaboration of flower-patches, and banks of shrubbery
within enjoyable distance of the door, while in the
midst of them, or at such little remove as works the
same result, a great array of shade trees is planted

128 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

After omy a few years, these gross feeders have seized
upon all the available plant-food within reach, and
with the great lusty boughs of the maples waving
over his cherished parterres, the proprietor is amazed
at the shrinkage of his flower-growth. It should be
fairly understood that about a densely shaded door-
step, the conditions of vigorous and healthful flower-
growth can never be maintained.

But far worse, and more to be deprecated than a
starvation of the flowers in the immediate neighbor-
hood of a country house, is the starvation of the turf;
yet in many of the old established village yards, and
about many suburban homes where the fancy for
dense overhanging shade has had full sway, even the
grasses maintain a doubtful livelihood, and their place
is taken by the wild mosses. It may be laid down, I
think, as a safe rule, and of universal application in
our Northern latitudes, that wherever shade immedi-
ately contiguous to the house is too dense for the vig-
orous growth of the ordinary lawn grasses, it is too
dense for proper conditions of health ; and I would
recommend to the invalid tenants of such a house — in
place of nostrums — the axe.

Of course, we can hardly venture to expose our
whole frontage to the sun, in the generous way in
which the British country liver is wont to do ; but
sunshine on the roof should, I think, be religiously

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 129

guarded, whatever may become of our old favorites,
the trees.

There is another condition of English country
life — aside from the climate — which admits of a freer
play of sunshine than we may be disposed to admit
it lies in the fact that British houses, whether of
brick or stone, are thick-walled (covered, many times,
with lichens, if not ivy), and so ward off very effect-
ually the fiercest blasts of July. The thatched roofs
of Devon and of Somerset are an even greater pro-
tection from the sun.

English and American Hedging.

A N OTHER striking subject of contrast between
-£•*- British and American country road-side, is
offered by the numberless array of live hedges which
belong to the former, and which probably for genera-
tions to come will be wanting in America. In the
best-cultivated districts of England, however, hedges
are rapidly losing favor for the partition of arable
lands, as engrossing too much space, stealing some-
what from the productive capacity of the soil, and
offering shelter for noxious weeds. The system of
soiling is moreover doing away with the necessity for
them, and such ground-feeding as is permitted, is
more closely and economically controlled by the
6*

130 • OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

adoption of movable hurdles. The clearing up of
those old lines of hawthorn may give delight to th
agricultural eye, but the lover of the picturesque will
lament their destruction. The cumbrous hedge-rows,
too, of Devon and of the Channel Isles (huge dykes
of earth with hedge and trees springing from their
top) are yielding to the demands of new and progres-
sive culture. I recall many a loitering of a summer's
day between these huge banks of green, within sound
of the Dart, or of the Exe, or of the beat of the
water in La Fret — the primroses dotting the close
sward, the hedges shutting out the light, the scattered
boles wound round with cloaks of ivy, the scant,
scraggy limbs interlacing above, and a constant mois-
ture upon the macadamized way, giving life to little
truant mats of mosses. But near to the centres of
travel and improvement, all these delightful old ridgy
banks of moss, and earth, and hedges, and trees,
have disappeared. The keen tenants, with the per-
mission of the landlords, are hunting them down in
the retired districts. And no wonder ; they occupied
full twenty feet in width ; every rod of them shaded
a good perch of grain land ; they offered capital
breeding places for scores of rabbits. But though a
great change is going on in this respect, as well as in
the removal of many of the hedges which mark the
interior divisions of the farms, the border lines, and

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 131

the way-side still show, every succeeding spring,
that wondrous wealth of white hawthorn bloom
which is so associated in the thoughts of all with
English rural landscape. Not always trim, it is true,
are the hawthorn hedges ; not without an occasional
interlacing of rampant brambles ; not without some
stray sapling of other growth cropping out, and
lording it over the line of hedge ; but gnarled, stiff,
strong, waving with the undulations of the hills,
twining with the curves of the road-way — unbroken,
save by here and there a stile or a cumbrous farm-
gate — with a fine spray of interlacing branchlets from
ground to top — white, and noisy with bees in all the
season of bloom — green, and wavy, and flowing in
the flush of the summer's growth — carrying their red
haws through all the early winter, and when the light
snows (as they do, rare times) veil the ground, show-
ing their creeping lines of brown up the hills, and
athwart the hills, and in soldierly array flanking every
country by-road.

When I think of those long billows of green skirt-
ing the paths, and look upon my prosaic posts and
rails, it seems to me plain enough that a great bit of
the warp upon which have been woven so many of
the charming rural pictures in British art and song,
is forever wanting to us here. Fancy a trim line of
posts running across the clayey ground of one of

132 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Gainsborough's landscapes ! Fancy old Walton sit-
ting under the " rails " for a little chit-chat with hia
blooming milk-maid ! Fancy Milton planting his

Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,

under the lee of a well-morticed rail-fence !

Yet, poetry apart, we shall probably keep by our
timber fences for many generations to come in Ameri-
ca ; first, because, in most parts of the country, it is
good economy to do so ; and next, because we have
as yet no hedge-plant which can thoroughly make
good the place of the hawthorn in England.

We are able to grow the hawthorn indeed ; but
it must be done daintily. It will never bear the
rough usage which its ordinary use as a hedge-plant
for farm purposes involves. The same is true to an
equal extent of the buckthorn, which, in addition, has
the bad habit of dying in many of our hard winters ;
and both these thorns are liable to the attacks of
insects (far more pestiferous with us, it would seem,
than in Europe), which seriously abridge their use.
The white-willow, so trumpeted by bagmen through-
out the country is thoroughly a humbug. It is indeed
sadly derogatory to the good sense of our rural popu-
lation that pretenders could ever foist a claim in
favor of a willow, of any known habit of growth,

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 133

upon their acceptance. The osage orange in certain
portions of the West, and of the Southwest, promises
to be very effective. It starts late in the spring, but
holds its foliage until the frost withers it. In the
extreme North, and in the Northeast, its shoots are
liable to be winter-killed, and its own rampant growth
is also against it, as an economic plant for hedging.
For effective treatment it requires two or three clip-
pings in the year. This is more, we fancy, than the
holders of Western prairie farms will be willing to
bestow. After mature years it may possibly show a
more tractable disposition in this respect. The honey-
locust has been adopted in many quarters, and has its
sturdy advocates. But it is open to the same objec-
tion of a too luxuriant growth on congenial soils, and
of the still more odious objection of a disposition to
" sucker," or send up shoots from the roots at a long
remove from the parent stem.

The barberry (Herberts vulgaris} is strongly com-
mended by many, but it has never yet had, so far as
I am aware, fair field trial. A strong objection to it
appears to me to lie in the fact that, like the willow,
it never inclines to branch from near the root. It
sends up indeed a great number of shoots ; but shoots
of this kind, growing parallel, and showing few leaf-
lets, or little side-spray, can never make a compact,
or even a graceful hedge. The old-fashioned farmers

134 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

of the East have still another objection, as firmly
cherished as any dogma they listen to on Sunday, to
wit, — the barberry " blasts the rye." This faith is
indeed so firmly and persistently cherished that I have
been disposed to look for the source of it in some
tribe of aphides peculiar to the barberry, which by
juxtaposition may transfer its labors to the cereal.

The native white-thorn remains — and it has always
seemed to me that with proper nursing, education,
and development, much might be made of this as a
hedge-plant. The hornbeam, also, of our forests, is a
small tree, of profuse spray, bearing the shears ad-
mirably ; but, so far as I know, never as yet adopted
on a large scale for hedges. The green walks of the
gardens of Versailles demonstrate amply what its
European congener will suffer in way of clipping.

In the way of evergreen hedge-plants we have
nothing to ask for from the nurserymen of Great
Britain. Both the arbor-vitae and the hemlock spruce
are admirably adapted to the purpose. The beauty
of this latter nothing can exceed, particularly in the
season of its first growth (early June), when its flossy
light green tufts hang over it like a great shower of
golden bloom. The arbor-vitas is perhaps more man-
ageable, and certainly less impatient of removal ; but
it can never become so effective. The Norway spruce
is also admirably adapted to hedge uses, and will

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 135

bear (if treated early] the closest clipping of the
shears. The grand error in its employment hitherto
has been in allowing it to gain some three or four
feet in height before resorting to the clipping pro-
cess.

In fact, the general failure of our hedge experi-
ments throughout the country — whether for service
or ornamentation — may be summed up in one word,
a lack of care. Farmers have bought hedge-plants
by the thousand, and plowing a single furrow or two
along the lines of their fields, have set them down
under the absurdly ill-founded opinion, that thence-
forward they would take care of themselves. But
the young and tender hedge-plant, like the young
growth of corn, needs culture. And the man who is
too indolent or too short-sighted to bestow it, will
surely never reap any considerable reward. It is
amazing — the short-sightedness which prevails in this
regard, not only with respect to hedging, but or-
charding, and tree-planting of all kinds. I count it
as necessary to the vigorous establishment of a newly-
set tree or shrub, that all foreign growth should be
kept away from an inclosing circle of from two to
four feet radius, as to bestow the like attention upon
a hill of corn or of melons. The little fibrous root-
lets, such as give nursing to the transplanted stock,
are as impatient of any robbery of those sources of

136 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

sustenance, which find their way through the ground,
as the annual plants. We should have heard far less
lament in this country over the failure of hedges if
there had been more considerate treatment of them
during the early years of their establishment.

If this careful nurture be requisite in respect to
stock from the nurseries, it is ten-fold more important
with respect to young plants transferred directly from
the forest. Scores of failures I have known on the
part of those, who — being delighted with the appear-
ance of some lusty screen of hemlocks — have under-
taken to rival it by direct transfer of the wild growth
to some lean streak of plowed land, and have there-
after left the shivering field-pensioners to struggle for
themselves. The half would very likely or very prop-
erly die ; the rest maintain only a meagre semblance
of life, and show none of that rampant vigor which is
essential to the beauty of a hedge. Indeed, except in
fully kept garden-ground, I would advise no one to
make this direct transfer. A season or two in the
nursery rows develops an enormous stock of rootlets,
and thereafter, with ordinary care, every plant may
be counted on.

I doubt very greatly the serviceableness of any of
the evergreen hedges for farm purposes ; both the
hemlock and Norway spruce, for full development,
demand considerable width, more than would be con-

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 137

sistent with farm-economy, and much greater than
would be ordinarily accorded to the hawthorn ; be-
sides which, they are by no means proof against the
mischievous forays of cattle, who love nothing better
than to tangle their horns in a wall of soft green and
twist away the branchlets. The thorn-bearing shrubs
are by no means so inviting to their ventures of this
sort.

I have not spoken of the holly — of which many
charming hedges are to be found on English estates
— because the British plant has not proved itself
wholly equal to our climate, and the American holly
(besides being somewhat inferior in glossiness and
density of foliage) has not yet been commonly intro-
duced even among nurserymen. In the way, how-
ever, of leafy screens for garden parterres and ter-
races, I have great hopes of what may yet be accom
plished with our Rhododendron and Kalmia latifolia.
The lank, lean habit of this latter under its ordinary
transplanting is no measure of its capacity for making
a full, rounded, dense wall of green. Whoever has
wandered over high-lying pasture-lands of New
England which have recently been cleared of their
forest growth, and has seen the wanton, luxuriant,
crowded tufts of Kalmia shooting from the old roots,
can form some measure of the capacity of the shrub
for good screen effects. The lank growth, too, of the

138 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Rhododendron in a few shaded swamp-lands where it
finds its habitat in New England, is no indication of
what may be done with it under fairer conditions of
growth.

And this mention of the laurel family (I like that
old popular naming of these shrubs) reminds me of
the screens and coppices which greet the eye so often
in English gardens and in English landscape. It is
quite possible that with our climate, we can never
equal their variety. The Bay, the Spanish laurel, the
Laurestina, will very likely be fastidious in adjusting
themselves to our winters. But with our narrow-
leaved laurel, our Latifolia, our Rhododendrons, we
can pile up a wealth of glossy green against the
northern sides of our gardens, which even the best
British farmers might envy. Add to these our
spruces (hemlock and others), our white pine (Stro-
bus), for background, and we have nothing to covet.

But if we have nothing to covet, we have very
much to learn in the adjustment of our leafy screens.
Over and over I observe some ambitious gentleman
(at the hands of his gardener) attempting to establish
a protective coppice, and after careful and expensive
preparation of the ground (there is nothing lacking
on that score), placing his rare evergreens where they
will be presently overgrown and lost, or putting out
his Rhododendrons where they will have no room for

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 139

full and rounded development, or crowding his
spruces, and his Deodars, and Scotch pines, so that in
a few years there is But a thicket of close-growing
boles — offering no shelter from the wind, and graded
by no forecast of the relative measure of growth.
Or if, by accident, the planting be judicious, there
follows none of that resolute trimming and bold use
of the axe, under which only a protective group of
trees can be made to maintain its rounded symmetry
and its artistic agreement with the landscape.

Indeed, we are as yet only beginning to learn
what the real worth of screening banks of foliage are
to fruit, to gardens, and even to grain-fields. It is
doubtful if it be not the last lesson — but certainly not
the least important — which is learned in ornamental
or economic arboriculture.

Village Greens.

IF I enter a little quiet plea for the old-fashioned
Village Greens, I hope I shall not be decried by
the reformers. Village Greens are not quotable at
the " Board." Our friend of the Avenue cannot dash
through them with his equipage. There are no
patches of choice exotics upon the village green —
possibly not even a serpentine path ; no fountain, I
am sure, that shows the spasmodic gush of the city

140 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

fountains. And yet the name — Village Green, is,
somehow, tenderly cherished ; it rallies to my thought
a great cycle of rural memories belonging to song, to
childhood, to story and to travel — wherein I see, in
bountiful procession, broad-armed elms, dancing peas-
ants, flocks of snowy geese, shadows of church
spires, boys with satchels, bonfires of fallen leaves,
militia " trainings," and some irate Betsey Trotwood,
making a soldierly dash at intruding donkeys. It is
quite possible that these ill-assorted memories may
confound public and private Greens, as well as Eng-
lish and American, but all have their spring in that
good old name of the Village Green. I hope that it
is not a strange name, and that it will never grow
strange while grass is green, and villages are founded.
In old days of stage-coach travel, one came, after
a tedious, lumbering drag over hills, and through
swampy flats, (where, if season favored, wild grape-
vines, or white azalias, tossed their rich fragrance into
coach windows,) upon some lifted plateau of land,
where the white houses shone among trees, flanking a
level bit of greensward, and geese grazed the com-
mon ; and where was a whipping-post, may be — pos-
sibly a decaying pair of oaken stocks, and a court-
house with its belfry. I do not think such old village
commons of New England, (and I suspect they were
rarely to be seen in other parts of the country,) were

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 141

ever very nicely kept. The geese cropped the grass
short, to be sure ; but a goose is not a tidy animal ;
the pool, too — if any pondlet of water broke the
surface of the level — was apt to show the stamp of
adventurous hoofs and a muddy margin ; for all this,
however, such eyelets of green space in the centre of
country towns, around which and upon which all the
gayety and cheer of the settlement might disport
itself, were very charming. I do not know but I
would rejoice to see the village stocks brought into
use again, for the sake of the broad common where
they stood : certain it is, that if they were ever ser-
viceable (I speak of the stocks), they would be ser-
viceable now. I think I could mention sundry indi-
viduals— not all of them editors — who would look
well — sitting in the stocks. And as for the whip-
ping-posts, who would not rejoice to see their
revival, provided only he could name the mar-
tyrs?

But I have no right to speak of the Village Green
as wholly a thing of the past, although such symbols
of order and discipline as the stocks and the whip-
ping-post have gone by.

Travellers rarely meet with them, it is true ; but
we do not travel by stage-coach nowadays. We do
not face the old orderly frontage of quiet, outlying
towns, as we did when we clattered down the main

142 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES,

street to the common and the tavern and the pump.
If we travel thitherward, we are thrust into the back-
sides of towns upon some raw cut of a railway, amid
all manner of debris and noisome smells. Now I
suppose that old-time villagers took a pride in their
common, with its stately trees — in their court-house,
their breadth and neatness of high-road, as being the
objects which must of necessity fasten the regard of
those from the outside world who paid their town a
visit. The two deacons who lived opposite, would
never decorate their door-yards, or walks, for the
entertainment of each other, but rather for the ad-
miration of the public, which must needs pass their
doors. But yet — and it is a curious fact in the his-
tory of public taste — in these times, when old villages
are disembowelled by the railway, and all their showi-
ness turned inside out, there seems very little regard
paid to the observation of that larger public which is
hurtling by every day in the cars.

The former traveller along the high-road, was cau-
tiously placated with orderly palings, neat door-yards,
an array of grass and flowering shrubs, with a church
in imposing position ; but the larger public that now
visits the locality is greeted with a terrific array of
backsides, of lumbering styes, disorderly fences, and
no token that the village world is cognizant of their
presence, or careful of their judgment. Of course, the

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 143

habit of villagers' life cannot be changed so quickly
as a railway cutting is made — the new world of pro-
gress may be upon them before they are aware ; but
when actually present, why not meet it with some-
thing of the old tidiness and pride ?

Can any rural philosopher explain us this matter ?
Does the whirl of the world into sudden sight of all
our disorderly domesticity, break up self-respect, and
weaken faith in appearances ?

Here, and there indeed, I observe one who newly
paints his rear door, and trims his hedges, and plants
his arbors, and gravels his walks, so as to impress
favorably the new passers-by of the rail ; but for one
who shows this solicitude respecting the new public,
a dozen keep to a stolid indifference, and living with
their faces the other way, leave the pigs and a mangy
dog to squeal and bark a reception to the world of
the railway.

I cannot quite explain this. Most of us love to
carry a name for respectability and good order and
decency, and do not like to be discovered kicking the
cat or indulging in any similar personal gratifications
or wants. It is true we do not know one in a thou-
sand of the ten thousand who hurtle past our home-
stead ; but how many of those who make up the
body of that public opinion, in the eye of which we
•wish to live with decency and order, do we know ?

144 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

What all this may have to do with the topic of
Village Greens, may be not quite clear to the reader ;
but I will try and develop its bearings. All the lesser
towns through which or near to which a railway
passes, have virtually changed face ; they confront
the outside world no longer upon their embowered
street or quiet common, but at the " station." There
lies the point of contact, and there it must remain
until the mechanicians shall have devised some airy
carriage which shall drop visitants from the clouds
upon the threshold of the cosy old hostelrie. There
being thus, as it were, a new focal point of the town
life, it wants its special illustration and adornment.
The village cannot ignore the railway : it is the com-
mon carrier ; it is the bond of the town with civiliza-
tion ; it lays its iron fingers upon the lap of a hundred
quiet valleys, and steals away their tranquillity like a
ravisher.

What then ? Every village station wants its little
outlying Green to give character and dignity to the
new approach. Is there any good reason against
this ? Nay, are there not a thousand reasons in its
favor ? In nine out of ten wayside towns, such space
could be easily secured, easily held in reserve, easily
made attractive ; and if there were no room for a
broad expanse of sward, at least there might be
planted some attractive copse of evergreens or slirub-

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 145

bery, to declare by graceful type the rural pride of
the place. He would be counted a sorry curmudgeon
who should allow all visitors to make their way to
his entrance-hall, through wastes of dust and piles of
offal ; cannot the corporate authorities of a town be
taught some measure of self-respect, and welcome the
outside world with indications of orderly thrift, bloom-
ing and carrying greeting to the very threshold of
the place ?

First impressions count for a great deal — whether
in our meeting with a woman, or with a village. Slip-
shoddiness is bad economy in towns, as in people.
Every season there is a whirl of citizens, tired of city
heats and costs, traversing the country in hah0 hope
of being wooed to some summer home, where the
trees and the order invite tranquillity and promise
enjoyment. A captivating air about a village station
will count for very much in the decision. There will
be growth, to be sure, in favored localities, in spite
of disorder. I could name a score of little towns
along the line of the New Jersey and Erie and Hud-
son Railways, with their charming suburban retreats
near by, to which the occupant must wade his way
through all manner of filthiness and disorderly debris,
making bis landing, as it were, in the very dust-heap
of the place, and smacking with a relish, it would
eeem, these prefatory incidents of his country home.

146 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Is there no mending this ? Will town or borough
officials always remain insensible to the good in-
fluences of an inviting and decorous approach to
the territory which is subject to their keeping?
Dram-shops, and oyster-shops, and slatternly land-
offices, will doubtless, under our present civiliza-
tion, have position somewhere ; but must they
needs be foisted upon the area about the village
Station? Must we always confront a town with
its worst side foremost? Suppose for a moment
that the old Village Green were translated to the
neighborhood of the station, or a companion spot
of rural attractiveness established there, around
which the waiting equipages might circle in attend-
ance— suppose a pleasant shade of elms spreading
itself upon that now dusty area — suppose the corpo-
rate authorities keenly alive to the aspect which their
town and its approaches may wear in the eye of the
world which looks on, and forms its -judgment every
day by thousands — suppose an inviting inn, duly li-
censed, swings its sign under some near bower of
trees, will all this count nothing toward the growth,
the reputation, the dignity of a country locality ? I
know I am writing in advance of the current practice
in these respects ; but I am equally sure that I am
not writing in advance of the current practice fifty
years hence, if only the schools are kept open. The

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 147

reputation of a town for order, for neatness, for liber-
ality, or taste, is even now worth something, and it
is coming to be worth more, year by year.

Railway Gardening.

I HAVE alluded to the railway station and its
surroundings, because it seems to me that — in
the lessons of public taste which are being read from
time to time by those competent to teach on such
topics — this new junction of the world with country
localities is being sadly overlooked. Where indeed
can there be a hopeful opening for any aesthetic teach-
ing, if this inoculation and grafting-point of the busi-
ness world with the world ruminant and rural, is al-
lowed to fix, with all its ugly swell of swathing band-
ages and pitch and mud, un cared for ?

The question of proprietorship might give some
difficulty, but it is one whose difficulties would vanish,
if only the corporate authorities of town and road
could be brought to act in harmony. Nor is there
any reason in the economies of the matter why they
should not. The road secures a limited area for the
establishment of its station, and some outlying
grounds, in most cases, to guard against future con-
tingencies— which grounds usually rest in a most

148 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

forlorn condition, giving refuge, may be, to con-
demned sleepers or wreck of wheels — possibly ten-
anted by some burly night porter, who thrusts his
stove-pipe through the roof of a dismantled car —
showing just that disarray, in short, which declares
no pride or proof of ownership. If there chance to
be any half-filled pits upon the premises, enterprising
Celtic citizens of the neighborhood count them good
spots into which to shoot their garbarge. All this
the town authorities regard as a matter which con-
cerns only the distinguished corporation of the road.
Thus, between them, the most unkempt and noisome
wilderness about the half of such of our country
towns as are pierced by railways is apt to lie in the
purlieus of the station. Yet railway directors are,
some of them, professing Christians, and so are town
authorities — at times. What now if these good peo-
ple (hcec verbi magnificentia /) would lay their heads
together to compass what might prove a gain to the
town thrift, and so indirectly to the road, without
positive loss to either ? What if the town were to
extend the area of the corporation lands at its own
cost, so far as to establish a little bowling green, that
should give piquant welcome to every stranger, and
grow to be an object of town pride ? What if care
of all grounds adjoining the station should be subject
to some custodian, bound to control them after some

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 149

simple prescribed rules of order, whose fulfilment
would work an economy to the company, and add a
grace to that portion of the village ?

I cannot help recalling to mind here some of
those charming wayside stations upon the Continent
— in France, Germany, and Switzerland — where the
station-master is also manager of a blooming garden
(the property of the company), which he manages
with such tender care that the blush of the roses and
the muffled scent of the heliotropes come to me again
as I read the name of the station upon the Guide
Book. And yet those French, those German, those
Swiss corporators, who encourage their station-mas-
ters to such handicraft, are shrewd money men.
They find their account in all this ; they like to make
their roads attractive ; the way-side villagers encour-
age them in it to the full bent of their capacity.

In one quarter (among those stations of which I
speak, but I cannot now just say where) I was pro-
voked into special inquiries : " This nice treatment
involved a great bill of expense doubtless ? "

" Yery great care — grand labor ! "

" It must make a heavy bill for the company to
foot ? "

"Pardon, monsieur, the work is mine and the
gain is mine."

" Not very much, it is to be feared."

ISO OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

" Pardon " again ; the station-master (it was only
an out of the way country station) has sold enough
of bouquets to passing travellers to establish his boy
at a pension: he hopes everything for his boy. The
story gave a new fragrance to the roses, and to the
Marguerites which he handed me.

Now, I am afraid our station-masters, whether in
Massachusetts or along the Hudson, will not be ca-
pable of making themselves good florists at a bound;
but yet the hint has its value. What objection can
there possibly be to the careful culture of such strips
of land as come within the jurisdiction of every sta-
tion-master upon our iron roads ? In not infrequent
instances he has the lea of some deep cutting for
shelter ; he has the eyes of an observing crowd (who
are debarred from pilfering) for an incentive ; he may
have his thousand customers for floral offerings every
summer's day. Could not the townsfolk aid, with
prudent foresight, in any such diversion of the waste
strips of railway lauds ? The area in gross is not
small ; miles upon miles of bank cutting, of marsh
land, of embankment, of green level, each one of
which will grow its own crop after methods which a
wealthy and intelligent railway corporation might
surely direct. Osiers upon the low lands, shrubs
upon the raw cuttings (binding them against wash),
grasses upon the verdant lands, a flame of flowera

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 151

around every station. Does anybody doubt that this
thing is to be in the years to come ? Does anybody
doubt (who believes in progress) that some day the
directors, now so stolid and indifferent, will make a
merit of it, and take a pride in pointing out their
horticultural successes upon their league-long strips
of garden?

One very great advantage in that nice culture
which is to be observed about many of the British
and Continental railway stations lies in the fact, that
the culture and its success are submitted every day to
thousands of eyes. What you or I may do very suc-
cessfully, and in obedience to the best laws of taste
and vegetable physiology on some back country prop-
erty, may really benefit the public very little, for the
reason that the public will never put eye upon it ;
but what our horticultural friend at a railway station
may do (if done well) is of vastly more profit. It is
in the way of being seen ; it is in the way of being
seen of those who are not immediately engrossed
with other care than the easy care of travel ; it gives
suggestions to them in their most accessible moods.
To this day I think I have fixed in my mind many a
little gracefully arranged parterre of bloom, only
petunias and pansies and four o' clocks, may be, which
I saw only a few moments on some day, now far
gone, in other latitudes, and of which the scant

152 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

memorial is but some jotting down upon a foreign
note-book, followed by a scant pencilling of the actual
adjustment, so far as the brief stay allowed of tran-
script.

The chemists tell us that the air of cities and their
neighborhood is richer in available nitrogen (in shape
of ammonia or nitric acid) than the air of the country,
by reason of the outpourings from so many chimney-
tops, and the attendant processes of combustion. May
not the cinders and the fine ash and the gases
evolved from a great higlnvay of engines always
puffing and smoking in the lower strata of the atmo-
sphere contribute somewhat, and that not inconsider-
ably, to the plants found along the lines of such high-
way ? I am not aware that experiment has as yet
determined anything on this score ; and whatever
such determination might be, it is certain that abund-
ant sources of fertilization might be secured at every
country station, sufficient amply to equip an invest-
ing garden. Upon the oldest roads very much could
be done still in way of this charming investiture, and
in way of the adjoining bowling-green, under encour-
agement of the town, or of neighboring property-
holders ; and upon all new lines of raihvay, wherever
new stations are established, everything could be
done. To make a township attractive, the approach
to it must be attractive. Will not our Western

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 153

burghers who are interested in the growth of town-
ships make a note of this fact, and do somewhat for
the benefit of the coming generation as well as for
their own advantage, by so ordering the establish-
ment of railway stations as to determine and insure
the attractive features I have named ?

Landscape Treatment of Railways.

\\J HILE upon this subject of railway gardens
» * and culture, I have a word to say to all who
have lands adjoining upon these iron clamps of our
present civilization. A great accession of responsi-
bility comes to them by reason of their position. A
slatternly wall, a disgraceful method of tillage, a reek-
ing level of undrained land, in far away districts, may
corrupt but few young farmers and confirni them in
bad practices, by reason of their isolation. But upon
a great highway of travel, where a thousand eyes
measure the shortcomings day by day, a good or a
bad example will have a hundred-fold force.

It would seem, indeed, as if a shrewd business
economy would commend care and nicety of tillage.
The adventurous hair-dressers and fabricators of a
myriad nostrums, paint their advertisements on the
rocks ; what better advertisement of a farm or garden,
7*

154 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

or nursery or wood or meadow, than such equipment
of them all with the best results of thorough care
and culture, as to fasten the eye and pique investiga-
tion ? I know a suburban architect who, by the har-
monies and order of a homestead, in full view of a
thousand travellers a day, has doubled his business.
So the grace of a parterre or the artistic arrangement
of a terrace or a walk in the eye of so many, may
make the reputation of a gardener. Every dweller,
indeed, upon a line of railway, has a reputation to
make or lose in all that relates to his treatment of
ground, whether as woodland, farm, or garden.

If the homestead be so near the clatter of the
trains as to give too great exposure of the domestic
offices, good taste, as well as the quiet which most
country-livers enjoy, will suggest a planting out of
the line of traffic by thickets of evergreens ; and
these, by their careful adjustment, and occasional
openings for a glimpse at the more attractive features
of the situation, will themselves give such a place a
character. If, however, the house be so remote as to
admit of all desired seclusion about the dooryard
and to yield only distant views of the trail of carri-
ages whirling up their white curls of steam, a mere
hedge may mark the dividing-line, or some simple
paling ; and the lands between, whether in lawn or
tillage, may be so ordered as to greet the eye of

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 155

every intelligent traveller, or impress upon him such
rural lessons as every adjoining proprietor should
make it a virtue to teach.

When a farm or country-seat is traversed by a
deep cutting for the railway bed — so deep as to for-
bid any extended side views — a tasteful proprietor
may still mark his lands noticeably, and well, by
arranging — in concert with the railway officials — an
easily graded slope upon either side of the cutting,
which, by a few simple dressings, shall be brought
into a grassy surface — telling a good story for the
flats above, and showing upon their extreme height a
skirting hedge-row or coppice, or possibly the trellis
of some rustic paling, blooming with flowers, and (it"
convenience of pathway require it) stretching upon
either side of a bridgelet, across the chasm of the
road. Even where such cutting is through cliff, noth-
ing is to forbid the dressing of the higher ledges with
a few crimson bunches of columbines, to nod their
heads between the eye of the traveller and the sky,
and make good report, from their little corners, of the
people whose every-day walk skirts the cliffs. If a
gradual slope, or terraces, are admissible by the
nature of the cutting, it is a question if these may not
be made to carry their parterres of flowers, or of
blooming shrubs, to give charm to the borders of an
estate. I have somewhere seen such slope, whereon

156 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

an adventurous nurseryman had given advertisement
of his name and calling by an ingenious arrangement
of his box-borders in gigantic lettering — not, perhaps,
a very legitimate rural decoration, or such as a severe
taste would commend — and yet I cannot but think
that a little trail of fiery flowers, scattered, as it were,
upon a bank of lawn, and spelling out some graceful
name (of the homestead), which should be discerni-
ble only one swift moment as the train flashed by
while to one looking forward or backward, it should
be only a careless ribbon of flowers flecking the green
— I say I can hardly fancy that this would smack of
tawdriness. However this may be, devices there are,
innumerable, for conferring grace upon such sudden
slopes as I have hinted at : a slope to the north will
carry admirably its tufts of rhododendron and of
kalmia, or its confused tangle of hemlocks and Law-
son Cypress.

The English ivy, too, will grow admirably in such
situations, upon a ground surface, taking root here
and there, and covering all the lesser inequalities
with its glossy network of leaves. Such condition
of growth, moreover, (trailing over the surface of the
ground,) insures protection by snows ; or, if that be
wanting, a thin coating of litter spread over the
creeper will be an ample defence. The ivy is winter-
killed, not so much by extreme cold, as by sudden

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 157

alternations of temperature, and exposure of its stiff
ened leaves to the scalding sunbeams which some-
times belong even to a northern winter. Protection
from the January sun is, I believe, as important as
protection from extreme cold.

Where the railway passes through a country prop-
erty upon the same general level with a lawn surface
or farm lands, the rules for adjustment — of crops or
of decorative features — so as to carry their best land-
scape effects, will be comparatively easy. All right
lines — whether of annual crops, hedge-rows, or ave-
nues— will, of a surety, lose effect by being established
parallel to the line of road. At what angle they
should touch upon it, will be best determined by the
nature of the surface, and by the conditions of the
background.

I know that it is the habit of many who control
large estates adjoining railways, to ignore, so far as
possible, this iron neighbor, and to make all their
plans of improvement with a contemptuous disregard
of the travelling observers, who count by thousands,
considering only the few who look on from the old
high-road, or those, still fewer, who have the privilege
of the grounds. But in a republican country, this is
monstrous ; monstrous, indeed, in any country where
a man properly reckons his responsibilities to his fel-
lows. If he has conceived new lessons of taste, it is

158 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

his duty so to illustrate them as to make them command
the acceptance of the multitude. He has no right to
ignore the onlook of the world, and be careless if the
world condemns or approves.

A high railway embankment traversing the low
lands of a country estate, if at a good remove from
the homestead, is not so awkward a matter to deal
with as might at first be supposed. A few years of
well-tended growth in a forest screen may be made
to exclude it altogether ; but care should be taken
lest such screen, by its uniformity, should present the
same tame outlines with the embankment itself. To
avoid this, the woody plantation should flow down in
little promontories of shrubbery upon the flat ; it
should have its open bays upon the embankment it-
self, disclosing at intervals a glimpse of the passing
trains ; and, above all, the bridge or culvert, which
keeps good the water-courses of the land, should be
distinctly indicated, and might have its simple deco-
rative features.

All this, if picturesque effect only is aimed at :
but if it be desirable to utilize such monster embank-
ment, it may be remembered that its shelter, if look-
ing to the south, would almost create a summer cli-
mate of its own, and would make admirable lee for
the forcing-houses of the gardeners, and for the
growth of whatever plants or vegetables crave the

WAY-SIDE HINTS. 159

first heats of the spring sun. The traveller will recall
the " little Provence," in the garden of the Tuileries,
where, by the mere shelter of a twelve-foot terrace wall
circling around against cool winds, a summer balmi-
ness is given to the locality even in winter, and phthi-
sical old men and feeble children find their way
thither to luxuriate in the sunshine.

If, on the other hand, such embankment flank the
north, its shadow will offer capital nursery-ground for
the rhododendrons, ivies, and all such plants as are
impatient of the free blast of the sun.

And, after all, if these happy accidents of posi-
tion and opportunity did not favor such special culture,
it should be the duty and the pride of the true artist
in land-work to ascertain what other growths would
be promoted by exceptional disturbances of surface.
The finest and highest triumphs in landscape art are
wrought out in dealing with portentous features of
ugliness, and so enleashing them with the harmonies
of a given plan as to extort admiration.

The railway, with its present bald embankments,
and its baldness of all sorts, is a prominent feature in
many of our suburban landscapes. It cannot be
ignored, and the study must be to harmonize its
sweep of level line, its barren slopes, its ugly scars,
its deep cuttings, with the order and grace of our
fields and homes. Rains and weather-stains and wild

160 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

growths are doing somewhat to mend the harshness ;
but a little artistic handling of its screening foliage,
and adroit seizure of the opportunities furnished for
special culture, will quicken the work. And it is to
this end that I have thrown out these hints upon so
novel a subject as that of railway gardening.

IV.
LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS.

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS.

landscape Gardening.

IS it an art or a trade that I propose for discus-
sion ? I think it is an art. The backwoodsman
would not agree with me ; there are many plethoric
citizens who would not agree. Good roads, and paths
laid where you want them, and plenty of shade trees
— is there anything more than this in the laying out
of grounds ? Is there any finesse, any special aptitude
requisite, or anything that approaches the domain oi'
art in managing the matter, as such matter should be
managed ?

I think there is ; and that it is an art as yet, in
this country, almost in its infancy ; and yet an art
instinctively appreciated by cultivated persons wher-
ever it declares itself, whether upon a small or a large
area.

164 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

We have admirable engineers who can lay down
an approach road, or other, with easy grades, and
great grace — so far as the curves count for grace ; and
we have gardeners who shall lay down your flower-
beds and grounds for shrubbery according to the
newest rules, and with great independent beauties in
themselves ; but it is quite possible that both these
classes of workers may fill their designs admirably,
and yet steer clear of the great principles of the art I
purpose to discuss. It is an art which takes within
its purview good engineering and good architectural
work, and good gardening, and good farming, if you
please ; but which looks to their perfect accordance —
which dominates, in a sense, the individual arts
named, and accomplishes out of the labors of each a
congruous and captivating whole.

Good farming, good gardening, good engineering,
and good architecture may stand side by side upon a
given estate, and yet, for want of due conception of
what the landscape really demands for its completed
charm, the effect may be incongruous and unsatisfy-
ing. Over and over again a wealthy proprietor seeks
to supply the somewhat that is lacking by inordina-
tive and cumulative expenditure : he may thus make
outsiders wonder and gape ; he may also secure a
great assemblage of individual beauties ; but the
charming oneness of effect which shall make his place

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 165

an exemplar of taste and a perpetual delight is some-
bow wanting.

The true art of landscape gardening lies in such
disposition of roadways, plantations, walks, and build-
ings as shall most effectively develop all the natural
beauties of the land under treatment, without con-
flicting (or rather in harmony) with the uses to which
such lands may be devoted. Thus, in a private estate,
home interests and conveniences must be kept steadily
in view, and these must never be sacrificed for the
production of a pictuesque effect, however striking in
itself. Again, in a public park the same law obtains,
and any good design for such must show great ampli-
tude of road sv ay, and broad, open spaces for the dis-
port of the multitude. Upon farm-lands, which I
hold to be not without the domain of landscape treat-
ment, there must be due regard to the offices of rural
economy, and the decorative features may be safely
brought out in the shape of gateways, belts of pro-
tecting shrubbery, or scattered coppices upon the
pasture-lauds. Upon ground entirely level, the range
of possible treatment is, of course, very much limited ;
but the true artist in landscape effects can do some-
thing even with this ; no architect worthy of the
name despairs if he is confined to four walls of even
height ; in his own art, if he loves it, he finds deco-
rative resources.

1 66 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

I have alluded to the possibility of artistic land-
scape treatment in connection with farm-lands ; this
opinion is, I am aware, opposed to the traditional
theory of the British writers upon the subject ; but
we are living in advance of a good many traditions
of that sort. The Duke of Marlborough keeps the
open glades of his park-land short and velvety by his
herd of fallow deer. Our wealthy citizen, on the
other hand, will probably keep his largest stretch of
level land in presentable condition with a Buckeye
Mower, and will depend upon the cutting as a win-
ter's baiting for his Alderney heifers ; but this will
not forbid an occasional group of oaks or maples, or
the massing of some graceful shrubbery around an
intruding cliff. It will never do, indeed, for us as
Americans to sanction the divorce of landscape from
our humbler rural intentions— else the great bulk of
our wayside will be left without law of improvement.
Not only those broad and striking effects which
belong to a great range of field and wood, or to bold
scenery, come within the domain of landscape art, but
those lesser and orderly graces that may be com-
passed within stone's throw of a man's door. We do
not measure an artist by the width of his canvas.
The panoramas that take in mountains are well, if the
life and the mists of the mountains are in them ; but
they do not blind us to the merit of a cabinet gem.

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 167

I question very much if that subtle apprehension of
the finer beauties which may be made to appear about
a given locality does not express itself more pointedly
and winningly in the management of a three or five
acre lawn, than upon such reach of meadow and
upland as bounds the view. The watchful care for a
single hoary boulder that b'fts its seared and lichened
hulk out of a sweet level of greensward ; the auda-
cious protection of some wild vine flinging its tendrils
carelessly over a bit of wall, girt with a savage
hedge-growth — these are indications of an artist feel-
ing thai will be riotous of its wealth upon a bare acre
of ground. Nay, I do not know but I have seen
about a laborer's cottage of Devonshire such adroit
adjustment of a few flowering plants upon a window-
shelf, and such tender and judicious care for the little
matlet of turf around which the gravel path swept to
his door, as showed as keen an artistic sense of the
beauties of nature, and of the way in which they may
be enchained for human gratification, as could be set
forth in a park of a thousand acres. Of course, I do
not mean to imply that the man who could fill a
peasant's rood of ground with charms of shrub or
flower, would, by virtue of so humble attainment, be
competent to produce the larger effects of landscape
gardening. This would, of course, involve a wider
knowledge and a different order of experience ; but

1 68 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the eye and the taste, which are the final judges, must
be much the same.

Farm, Landscape.

IN" further reference to the possible connection of
landscape art with lands submitted every year to
agricultural and economic uses, I propose to examine
the matter in detail. If all farm-lands showed only
the method of Alderman Mechi's, and his system
of pumping dirty water by steam into the middle of
any field — to be distributed thence by hose and
sprinklers — should prevail, we should have, of course,
only flat surfaces and rectangular fields to deal with.
But it is safe to say that it will not prevail upon most
of our American farms for many years to come ; yet
it is none the less true that farm-lands are chiefly
valued for the crops they will carry, and for the
annual return they will make. Are lands under such
rule of management susceptible of an aesthetic gov-
ernance as well ? Will treatment with a view to
profit, discard of necessity all consideration of taste-
ful arrangement? I think not, and for reasons
among which I may adduce the following : Judicious
location of a farm-steading, with a view to profit
simply, will be always near the centre of the Ian da
farmed : this is agreeable, moreover, to every land-

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 169

scape-ruling in the matter. The ricks, the chimney,
the barn-roofs, the dove-cots, the door-yard, with its
skirting array of shrubbery and shade trees, — if only
order and neatness belong to them, as good economy
would dictate, — form a charming nucleus for any
stretch of fields. If there be a stream whose power for
mechanical purposes can be made available, economy
dictates a location of the farm buildings near to its
banks : taste does the same. If there be a hill whose
sheltering slope will offer a warm lee from the north-
westers, a due regard for the comfort of laborers
and of beasts, to say nothing of early garden crops,
will dictate the occupancy of such sheltered position
by the group of farm buildings : taste will do the
same. If such slope has its rocky fastness, incapable
of tillage, and of little value for pasture, economy will
suggest that it be allowed to develop its own wanton
wild growth of forest : a just landscape taste will
suggest the same. If there be a broad stretch of
meadow or of marsh land, subject to occasional over-
flow, or by the necessity of its position not capable
of thorough drainage, good farming will demand that
it be kept in grass : good landscape gardening will
do the same.

Again, such rolling hillsides as belong to most
farms of the East, and which by reason of their
declivity or impracticable nature are not readily sub-

1 70 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

ject to any course of tillage, will be kept in pasture,
and will have their little modicum of shade. The
good farmer will be desirous of establishing this
shade around the brooklet or the spring which waters
his herd, or as a sheltering belt to the northward and
westward of his lands : the landscapist cannot surely
object to this. The same shelter along the wayside
is agreeable to all aesthetic laws, and does not surely
militate against any of the economies of farming.
Indeed, I may remark here, as I have already done in
the progress of these pages, that the value of a shel-
tering belt of trees is not sufficiently appreciated as
yet by practical farmers ; but those who are not
insensible to the quick spring growth under the lee
of a northern garden-fence, will one day learn that an
evergreen belt along the northern line of their farms
will show as decisive a gain in their fields or their
orcharding.

Again, in the disposition of roadways, there is no
rule in landscape gardening which is not applicable
to a farm. Declivities are to be overcome by the
easiest practicable grades, and the curves which will
insure this in most landscapes are those which are
justified at a glance by the economic eye, as well as
by the eye of taste. A straight walk up and down a
hill, is a monstrosity in park scenery ; and it is a
monstrosity that cannot be found in pasture-lands,

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 171

where cattle beat their own paths. Even sheep, who
are good climbers in search of food, whenever they
wend their way to the fold, take the declivities by
zigzag, and give us a lesson in landscape art. An
ox-team, in worming its way through woodland and
down successive slopes, will describe curves which
would not vary greatly from the engineering laws of
adjustment.

Once more, there are certain special features about
a farm-steading, which may be led to contribute
largely to landscape effect without violation of econo-
mic law. These are the ventilators upon the barn
roof (which no good barn should be without), the
dove-cots, the chimney-stacks, the ricks (for which a
nice thatch is an economy), the Dutch barns, with
their pointed roofs and rustic base, the windmill (if
one is dependent upon pumps), the orcharding — all
which may be made to contribute their quota to an
effective landscape, without great violation of the
practical aims of the farmer.

I have dwelt upon this point, because I love to
believe and to teach that in these respects true taste
and true economy are accordant, and that the graces
of life, as well as the profits, may be kept in view by
every ruralist, whether farmer or amateur. There
have been certain fermes ornkes both in England and
France (may be in this country too), which I do not

172 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

at all reckon in my estimate of the relations of good
farming to the positive laws of taste. They are play-
farms, upon which it is thought necessary, (however
flat the surface,) to give to the fields all manner of
irregular and curvilinear shapes. Such an arrange-
ment is to every judicious farmer an affront. If a
field takes irregular shape for sufficient reason — in its
surface, or encroachment of cliff, border territory, or
water, — well and good ; the farmer can account for
it, and accommodate his labors to it. But if it be a
fantasy merely, which requires him to back his team
and give inequality to his " lands," his common-sense
revolts at it ; he sees an empty device that interrupts
his labor and provokes his contempt. The contempt,
I think, any man of true taste will share with him.

There is nothing horrible in a straight line (what-
ever some gardeners may think) upon flat surfaces.
I am inclined, indeed, to favor strongly the old Dutch
instinct for long clipped avenues, and for the straight
belts of trees along their water-courses, in Holland.
Why should they puzzle themselves with curves,
where no curves were needed ? Or over the great
sheep plains of Central France, what mockery it
would have been to conduct a highway (or any other
way for convenience) by the meanderings which
belong so naturally to a highway of Devonshire !

Of course, I speak of landscape here in a large

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 173

way. A man may very properly have his door-yard
and garden curvatures upon a plane surface, if they
be accounted for by judicious planting. I have even
seen little hillocks thrown up upon a two-acre patch
of adroitly arranged pleasure-ground which suggested
agreeably larger and more graceful hillocks near by
that were not attainable. But a man who should
undertake the building of a considerable hill in a
level country to relieve the monotony, would very
likely have his labor for his pains. Even the great
tumulus upon the field of Waterloo, upon which the
Belgian lion snuffs the air, had to me always a most
absurd look of impropriety. A group of white head-
stones or a column of marble would have told more
gracefully the story of the Belgian dead. The stu-
pendous rock-work at Chatsworth, again, always ap-
peared to me a most monstrous waste of good honest
material and honest labor. It is very costly and
expensive ; but one of the least of God's cliffs would
overshadow it utterly. Its artificiality cannot cheat
one who knows what rocks are in the fissures of the
hills ; and he looks upon it, at best, with the same
sort of foolish wonderment with which he looks upon
the wooden puppets in the Dutch gardens of Broek.

Thus much I have written to show, so far as I
might, that the small landholder can avail himself
of the laws of the best landscape art, and in virtue

174 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

of them can confirm and establish the neatness and
order of his fields. There is, indeed, an artificiality
about his straight lines of crops, and his rectangular
enclosures which does not tempt the painter ; but it
is an artificiality that excuses itself. There is a fitness
and propriety in it, which, when contrasted, as it
may be, with the farmer's clumps of pasture shade,
his wayside trees, and his leafy screen of the farm
buildings, is not without a certain charm.

Lands not Farmed.

f I ^HERE is, however, a higher grade of landscape
-*• beauty than can belong to lands tilled for their
economic returns, just as there is a higher grade of
man than the agricultural laborer. I propose to
indicate some of the methods by which this higher
beauty may be made to declare itself. First of all, in
the immediate neighborhood of every country home-
stead, (the site and architecture being already deter-
mined on, and not, therefore, subject to present dis-
cussion,) there must be neatness and order; no
tangled weedy growth, no paths half matted over :
there must be abundant evidence of that presiding
and watchful care without which every homestead,
whether within or without, lacks its most considera-
ble charm. If the beauty of the remoter landscape

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 175

lie in its wild and unkempt condition, the contrast of
extreme care at the house-side with such savagery,
will be all the more engaging. And if the beauty of
the outer landscapes lie merely in graceful and undu-
lating forms, care around the doorstep will be requi-
site to mark definitely the outflow of the domestic
wants and influences. The path I tread ten times a
day should be smooth ; the patch of croquet ground
should be reduced to absolute level, and any intrud-
ing tussock be shorn away from reach of the tender-
footed gamesters ; but the walk along the further
hill-side, where I go only after a long reach of days,
may be only a tramped foot-path on the sward ; and
the stretch of turf-land where the Alderneys are feed-
ing may have its eyelets of dandelion and golden
buttercups. But the care and order of which I speak
should not be a finical nicety. Martinetism is odious
everywhere. It must be a care that shall conceal
itself — that shall be marked by the lack of every-
thing disagreeable, and not be cognizable by traces
of a recent broom or roller. The scar of a spade-cut
is an unpleasant reminder of the art which is best
when all traces of its mechanical devices are out of
sight. Of course, there must be clippings and roll-
ings, but they should be so deftly done, and with such
watchfulness, as regards season, as to make the
observer forget they had ever been used.

1 76 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Again, it comes within the domain of landscape
art to secure an agreeable lookout from the door and
the cherished windows of the country homestead,
whatever may be its situation. Accident or choice
of site may, indeed, secure this beyond question ;
but, site being established, where views are limited
or obnoxious objects fret the eye, it is surprising
what may be done by judicious planting, and the
re-adjustment of walls or fencing or hedging, to ofier
the pleasant lookout we demand, though it be bound-
ed by a gunshot. With a reach of twenty rods
before one's eye and in one's keeping, there is no
possible excuse for not giving it charming objects to
rest upon — objects that will not pall, but grow upon
the affections of every true lover of the country.

Your neighbor's slatternly barn troubles you —
plant it out ; the toss of the tops of hemlocks will
not be odious. A wavy bald wall irritates you ; if
needed as a barrier, cover it with wild vines, or flank
it with hedging, or so plant your coppices on either
side, in and out, that its line shall be indistinguish-
able. Is there a low bit of sedgy ground that can be
made nothing of, for the reason that the adjoining
proprietor (who holds the lower lands) will enter
into none of your schemes of drainage ? Plant it
with rhododendrons and the red-berried alder ; or if
it be a mere morass, tumble into it a few of the

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 177

mossy stones from the higher slopes, and equip it
with the wood-ferns or clematis. There is no spot,
indeed, so ungainly that it cannot be cheated of its
roughness by such appliances of bush and vine and
plant as our own woods will furnish ; no stretch of
lawn so meagre that you may not throw across it
morning and afternoon, such splintered bars of light
and shadow from its encompassing trees as will
charm the looker-on. In all places of limited range,
and which, from the necessities of position, are with-
out wide-reaching views, it is doubtful if the eye
should be allowed to rest upon any very determinate
and defined barrier, as marking the extreme limit of
the grounds. An irregular belt of wood or lesser
growth of shrubbery will offer pleasant concealment
and take away the sharpness of limitation, while some
picturesque feature in a neighbor's grounds beyond,
though it be only a dove-cot or the ventilator upon
the barn-roof, or a gardener's cottage, may, by the
vagueness and indeterminate character of the inter-
vening barrier, become more surely yours by the pos-
session of the eye. It is specially the province of the
art we are considering, to avail itself of all within
reach of the view, whatever may lie between, and
make it contribute to the oneness of the home pic-
ture. True art does not inquire who made the pig-
ments, or whose name they bear, but only, will they
8*

i/8 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

add to the effect of the work in hand ? If, by cut-
ting a few trees from the copse upon the hill-side, I
can bring ray neighbor's broad-armed windmill into
view, I am taking a very legitimate means of availing
myself of his expenditure ; and if the usual anchor-
age-ground for my neighbor's yacht is shut off only
by a tuft of shrubbery upon my lawn, I will cut it
away and enjoy his yacht (at anchorage) as much as
he.

There are many country places which from their
position, possess an outlook so broad and grand as
to demand no consideration of special views, and
where landscape art will find range not only in the
ordering of lesser details, but in partial concealment
of the beauties that confront the eye. The situations
to which I allude are upon such range of highland as
to offer — very likely from the adjoining public road — a
similar width of view ; but the house-view must have
some special consecration of its own — some veil of
intervening foliage may be, through which the ravish-
ing distance shall come by glimpses ; some embower-
ment of trees, under which, as in a rural framing, the
great picture of the rivers and the. mountains shall
take new sightliness ; some tortuous walk through im-
penetrable shrubberies, from the midst of whose dim-
ness you shall suddenly burst out upon the glory of
the far landscape. Such devices are needful not only

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 179

to qualify the monotony of one unvarying scene, be-
wildering from its very extent — not only to distinguish
the home view from that of every plodder along the
highway, but furthermore, and chiefly, to show such
traces of art management as shall quicken the zest
with which the natural beauties, as successively un-
folded, are enjoyed. A great scene of mountains, or
river, or sea, or plain, is indeed always a great scene ;
but in the presence of it a country home is not neces-
sarily a beautiful home. To this end, the art that
deals with landscape effect must wed the home to the
view ; must drape the bride, and teach us the piquant
value of a " coy, reluctant, amorous delay."

Again, it should be a cardinal rule in landscape
art (as in all other art, I think) not to multiply means
for producing a given effect. Where one stroke of
the brush is enough, two evidence weakness, and
three incompetency. If you can secure a graceful
sweep to your approach-road by one curve, two are
an impertinence. If a clump of half a dozen trees
will effect the needed diversion of the eye and pro-
duce the desired shade, any additions are worse than
needless. If some old lichened rock upon your lawn
is grateful to the view, do not weaken the effect by
multiplying rocks. Simple effects are the purest and
best effects as well in landscape art as in moral
teaching.

i8o OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

A single outlying boulder will often illustrate by
contrast the smoothness of a lawn better than the
marks of a ponderous roller. One or two clumps of
alders along the side of a brooklet will designate its
course more effectively and pleasantly than if you
were to plant either bank with willows. A single
spiral tree in a coppice will be enough to bring out
all the beauty of a hundred round-topped ones. Be-
cause some simple rustic gate has a charming effect
at one point of your grounds, do not for that reason
repeat it in another. Because the Virginia creeper
makes a beautiful autumn show, clambering into the
tops of one of your tall cedars with its five-lobed
crimson leaflets, do not therefore plant it at the foot
of all your cedars. Because at some special point the
red rooflet of a gateway lights up charmingly the
green of your lawn, and fastens the eye of visitors,
do not for that reason make all your gateways with
red rooflets. If some far-away spire of a country
church conies through some forest vista to your eye,
do not perplex yourself by cutting forest pathways to
other spires.

Again, (and I think I have trenched upon this topic
previously in the course of these pages,) every pos-
sessor and improver of a country estate, however
small or however large, should work upon clearly
defined plans, decided upon from the beginning. I

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 181

do not mean to say that diagrams and surveyor's
maps may be positively necessary, provided the
director of the improvements has a clear understand-
ing of the boundaries and surface, and a clear under-
standing of the effects he wishes to accomplish. I
only insist that promiscuous planting, and the laying
down of paths, little by little, or year by year, with-
out reference, clear and constant, to the final results,
and to a plan that shall embrace the whole property,
will involve great waste of labor, and the inevitable
undoing in the future of what may be done to-day.
Of course, where such work is intrusted to a corps
of gardeners and laborers, complete diagrams will be
necessary ; and it is only where the constant personal
supervision of the director, whether proprietor or
other, can be counted on, that such detailed exhibit
of the work in hand can be dispensed with. No
general plan, such as I refer to, can be safely matured
without, first, full and intimate knowledge of the
ground and its environs, and, second, a clear under-
standing of the intentions and tastes of the proprietor
under whose occupancy the plan is to reach fulfil-
ment.

I do not at all mean to say that the laws of taste
in respect to landscape art are to meet revision
at the will of any chance proprietor, or that the art
itself has not its elemental principles which no occu-

1 82 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

pant of a country estate can safely disturb. But one
landholder has a penchant for agriculture, and wishes
to make all the available acres contribute to his taste
for cattle or crops ; another has a horticultural mania,
and wishes the outlay to take such a shape as shall
most contribute to his special pursuit ; still another
foresees a demand for his acres as villa sites, and
desires such arrangement as shall best contribute to
their conversion into some half-dozen or more of
attractive homesteads ; and yet another wishes such
improvement as shall best develop the natural features
of the place, and insure the most economic treatment
of the same, without any view to future sale, or to
whims, whether horticultural or agricultural.

Now it is strictly within the province of land-
scape art to meet either or all of these views without
violation of its elemental principles. I have already
intimated how far the offices of husbandman and his
methods of culture may be subordinated to good
landscape effect: of horticulture this is even more
true. In laying out with a view to ultimate division
of country property for villa sites, there are certain
difficulties in the way. In a general sense, it is true
that the more you make beautiful a country property,
the more you make it inviting for country residences.
But landscape design with a view to a single owner-
ship and a single home establishment must needs be

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 183

different from one -which looks to the dispersion of
the property into a dozen lesser homes. Absolute unity
of plan will, in such a case, be naturally out of the ques-
tion. There must be some measure of sacrifice to the
contingencies reckoned upon ; no sacrifice of charm,
indeed, when the purpose is understood : six adjoin-
ing sites, well ordered, and planted with a view to
future occupancy, may embrace a thousand beauties,
but will not, of course, preserve that unity of effect
which would belong to a single permanent property.

On the score of taste, a competent landscape-gar-
dener has no need to compare notes with the pro-
prietor of country property ; but he should be put in
full possession of all the economies of his plan. Does
he wish a reservation for agricultural purposes, foi
vineyard, for orcharding, more than will be essential
to his household supply ? Does he count upon subse-
quent division of the property for building purposes ?
These questions should meet full discussion and
the outlay be adjusted thereby. But it is unfortu-
nately true that half the owners of country estates
entertain no considerations of this kind, and, entering
upon their improvements with a vague improvidence,
find after a lapse of years, the bulk of them useless
and inconvertible. City improvements may be under-
taken without long look into the future ; errors may
be amended as fast as brick and mortar can be piled

1 84 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

together ; but great trees do not grow in a night, or
in a year. In America, we must count upon divisions
and subdivisions of property. Great ancestral estates
will nowhere be long ancestral. Our republican mill
grinds them sharply. Hence we lack, and must
always lack that artistic dealing with country estates
which can count upon oneness of proprietorship for an
indefinite period of years. Better to admit this in
the beginning, and let our landscape art take its form
accordingly, than to weary itself with imitation of
what is feudally and mercilessly old. Nothing can
cheat us, indeed, of the beauty of God's trees and
flowers and wood-paths. Nature is as much to the
occupant of a fifty-acre holding, as to the Duke of
Devonshire, or the Marquis of Buccleugh. But half
a thousand acres of sylvan glade and of velvety turf
cannot be maintained with us from generation to
generation as the feeding ground for fallow deer ; it
may, however, have such keeping and embellishment
as shall fit it for a score of fair homes. Better the
homes with cheerfulness in them than the deer-park
with want shivering beyond the walls.

City and Town Parks.

office of a park is wholly different from that
of a village green ; the same demands do not

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 185

suggest the two. The city square or plaza is the city
representative of the village common : this latter
being only a rural plaza whereon the green-sward is
a more economic and appropriate pavement than
stones ; the incessant traffic and wear of a metropolis
do not blot the grass.

The park represents not only a demand for space
and trees, but a revival and reassertion of country
instincts which city associations are only too apt to
infold and entomb ; but, however drearily infolded,
there comes some day to all denizens of cities a resur-
rection of those earlier rural instincts which crave
growth and food — an outburst, through all the stony
interstices of pavement, of the love of trees and
green things. Not until a city has become so large
as to deny to very many living in its interior intimate
association and familiarity with the encompassing
belt of country will this new need declare itself
strongly. Nay, in a city, whose elevated situation,
gives outlook from its open spaces upon great fields
of greenness around it, such need of park land will
not for a long period of years be felt.

Eventually, not only will the instinctive rural
longings of the masses stimulate to this struggle to
recover the lost birthright of trees and turf, but the
very vanities of city growth will demand a larger
airing than populous streets can supply ; and the man

1 86 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

who loves a sleek team, and indulges in its display
will vie with the workman (who wants romping
place for his children) in clamor for a public park.
If our vanities and our healthful tastes were always
as closely yoked, we should have a better growth
from the yoking. However, it may come about —
whether from the natural impulses of a crowded
population to ally themselves once again with the
bounteous amplitude of the fields, or whether from
the artificial desire to give room and exhibition to
equipages — it is undeniable that all towns of ambi-
tious pretensions and of assured and rapid growth do,
after a certain period of street packing, bestir them-
selves in a feverish way to secure some easy lounging-
place under the trees. Unfortunately the stir is, for
the most part, at so late a day, that all available or
desirable localities have been secured for other pur-
poses. But, whatever the alternative of cost, I can-
not learn that such an enterprise, when thoroughly
matured and in complete operation, has ever proved a
disappointment. I have never heard of a disposition
on the part of voters to rescind any appropriation for
such a purpose, and to convert a public garden or
park to economic uses. I never heard of an instance
where pride did not speedily attach to the public
grounds, if accessible and well cared for, and where
the people of such a town did not make a boast and
a glory of the endowment.

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 187

Even in countries where such far-sighted improve-
ments are effected by the force majeure of an Imperial
edict, popular resentments or revolutions never find
their leverage in such tokens of extravagance. There
are not a thousand men in Paris, rich or poor, who
would make quarrel with Louis Napoleon for the
millions lavished upon the Bois de Boulogne, or the
appointments of the Park Monceau. But there were
tens of thousands of malcontents, in Louis Philippe's
time, with the fortification bill, and the inclosure for
private uses, of a terrace of the garden of the Tuil-
leries. The people may not, indeed, have a very clear
sense of their wants in the matter of a public park,
but once supply them attractively and accessibly, and
they feel the appositeness of the supply, and cling to
it with as much obstinacy as pride.

We Americans have a way of shrinking from pro-
spective taxation, whatever the purpose of it may be ;
but when once fairly saddled with it, whether for the
benefit of corporations or monopolies or public im-
provements, we bear it with a most admirable un-
flinchingness. The costs of public gardens or parks,
if well ordered, and not made the vehicle of private
peculation, are not such as would create a remon-
strance from the people of any American city ; and
the difficulty in the way of establishment would
He not so much in a general spirit of hostility to

1 88 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

increased taxation, (though that spirit, as I have
hinted, has a wonderful catlike watchfulness,) as in
the private jealousies that must be harmonized before
any large real estate improvement is practicable. I
defy any benevolent gentleman, in a town of thirty
thousand active, and newspaper-reading inhabitants,
to propose a scheme for a public garden or park, upon
a designated spot of ground, without starting an
angry buzz of opposition from other equally benevo-
lent gentlemen, who see in it only a device to bring
about the rapid appreciation of property which is not
their own. The quick-sightedness with which the
philanthropists of one side of a smallish city will detect
flaws in the philanthropy of men living on the other
side of a smallish city, is indeed something marvellous.
Thus it happens that some brave and honest project
for park or water supply, or sewerage, will welter for
years in some slough of opposing doubts, all whose
obstructing slime is made up of such miserable, local
jealousies as I have hinted at. The same traces of
satanic influence belong, I think, to the philosophers
who make up our national Congress, so that our
best bits of legislation seem to come upon us by ac-
cident, when our wisest legislators are asleep, or tired,
or — worse.

In the days of our present civilization and educa-
tion, it is hardly to be doubted that the majority of

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 189

intelligent voters in any considerable town would
declare for the utility of a public park or garden ;
but whether their wishes can be made effective for
the establishment of such a result is another ques-
tion, and one which must drift into the arena of town
politics — where I leave it ; proposing only to discuss
here some of the aims of such an endowment, some
of the possibilities in that direction, the conditions
of its success, and permanent usefulness to the
masses.

Place for Parks.

"TTMRST of all, a public park should be as near as
-*• possible to the town ; best of all, perhaps, if in
the very centre of the town, or, as in the case of some
of the old walled towns of Europe, girting it with a
circle of green. I hardly think any public gardens
of the world contribute more to the health and enjoy-
ment of the adjacent population than those of Frank-
fort-on-the-Main, which lie all about their homes, and
which are planted upon the line of the old fortifica-
tions. Even the ill-kept walks upon the ancient walls
of Chester and York (in England), by their nearness
to the homes of the people, and by the delightful out-
look they offer, are among the most cherished prome-
nades I know. But with us, who have no girting

i go OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

walls, and rarely vacant spaces about our commercial
centres, these pleasant breathing-places must be
pushed into the outskirts of our towns. I say — rarely
vacant spaces ; but while I write, there occur to me
instances of beautiful opportunities neglected, one of
which, at least, I will record. The thriving little city
of Norwich, in eastern Connecticut, is situated at the
confluence of two rivers, which form the Thames.
Along either shore of the Yantic and the Shetucket,
the houses of the town are picturesquely strewed in
patches of white and gray ; but between the rivers
and the lines of houses, the land rises into a great
promontory of hill — toward the east, forming a Sal-
vator-Rosa cliff, shaggy with brush- wood and cedars —
toward the south and west, a steep declivity on which
the swiftly slanting sward-land is spotted with out-
cropping ledges ; to the north a gradual slope falls
easily away to the great plains, where lie the bulk of
the suburban residences. Within twenty or thirty
years the whole upper surface of this central hillock
might have been secured for the merest bagatelle, and
would have made one of the proudest public prome-
nades imaginable, accessible to all walkers from the
south and east, and to all equipages from the north,
and offering level plateau for drives that would have
commanded the most enchanting of views ; but the
occasion has gone by; inferior houses hold their

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 191

uneasy footing on the hill-side, and a gaunt-jail,
which is the very apotheosis of ugliness, crowns this
picturesque height.

Another little city, that of Hartford, in the neigh-
bor State of Connecticut, has made the most of its
opportunities by converting into a charming public
garden a weary waste of ground that lay between its
railway station and the heart of the city. The op-
portunity was not large, to be sure, but it was one
that needed a keen eye for its development, and the
result has shown that commercial thrift may not
unfrequently take its lesson with profit from the sug-
gestions of a cultivated taste. There is many a
growing town having somewhere within its borders
such unsuspected aptitude and capability, that only
needs an eye to discern it, and the requisite enterprise
to develop in the very heart of the population a
garden and a public promenade that would become a
joy forever. It must be remembered, furthermore,
that it is quite impossible to make such transmutation
of waste and unsightly places into an attractive area
of garden-land, without increasing enormously the
taxable value of all surrounding property. I recall
now, in one of our most thriving seaside cities, a
great slough of oozy tide-mud of many acres in
extent, shut off from the harbor front by a low rail-
way embankment, showing here and there a riotous

192 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

overgrowth of wild sedges, foul with heaps of
garbage, uninviting in every possible way, and yet
lying within stone's throw of the centre of the city.
Sandy highlands, almost totally unimproved, flank it
immediately upon the west — disposed there, as it
would seem, for the very purpose of furnishing easy
material for the filling in of the flat below. A few
thousands would accomplish this, and judicious plant-
ing and outlay would in three years' time establish a
charming promenade or garden in the centre of the
sea-front of the town, and there is not one of the
adjoining pieces of property but would be doubled in
value by the operation. The neglect of such oppor-
tunities, whether due to miserable local jealousies, or,
as often happens, to the short-sightedness and indif-
ference of municipal authorities, is surely not compli-
mentary to our civilization.

The term " near to town," in these times of horse
railways, has rather a relative than positive signifi-
cance. Three miles, by a fair, broad avenue, upon
which well-equipped cars are making their rounds
every half hour of the day, is not half so large a
distance for either the laboring or the business man
to compute, as a mile and a half of ill-kept, old-
fashioned turnpike road.

The truth is, that citizens of sleepy towns in the
interior are losing their reckoning about distances ;

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 193

they have not been educated to metropolitan esti*
mates. The Wall Street man sneers at two miles of
walk before business ; your small broker of a country
city, on the other hand, advertises for a tenement
" within half a mile of the post-office." I never see
such an advertisement but I think some Rip Van
Winkle has just waked, and that his friends should
give him a combing and nursing.

Ready accessibility is the true measure of distance
in our day, and a town park must be easily accessible
to all classes. It must be a matter in which the
humblest citizens can take pride and comfort. Those
cities which have considerable open spaces in the
shape of" common," " green," or " squares," scattered
here and there, are the last to wake to any need of a
park which shall give drives, and such sources of
diversion as belong legitimately to a public park.
The central commons and greens may do very well
in the early stages of a city's growth, but there comes
a time when the municipal edicts forbid ball-playing
and cricket, at which date there is reason to plan
some larger forage ground for our youthful sports.

And it is precisely this forage ground for the
developing muscle of Young America that the town
park should furnish. Cricket ground, base-ball
ground, and parade ground for the ambitious troops

of the municipality should be as sedulously cared for
9

194 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

as a good roadway for carriages. A skating pond
would belong fitly to the requirements, and, if no
river or harbor offered better space, an opportunity
for boating would be wisely included. It is not
supposed that a feasible spot of ground in the neigh-
borhood of most cities can command and make good
these requirements. But much more can be done
than is imagined if the best available talent is secured
for the work in hand. Even in our fast days, it is
quite wonderful to find what a multitude of people
go to sleep upon advantages which, judiciously
ordered, would make them rich. There is many a
river valley, in the close neighborhood of cities,
covered now with rank and unprofitable grasses, over
which, at small cost, might be given flow to a lake
that would wash on either shore the banks of high-
lands, admirably fitted for drives, and already clothed
with the forest growth of half a century.

'Equipment of Public Gardens.

AS I have already said, it is requisite that a town
park should offer a charming drive ; so far
charming that every townsman will feel it incum-
bent on him to give each stranger guest a full view
of its attractions. These latter must lie, either in
commanding views of the town itself and its environs,

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 195

or in landscape effects which have been wrought out
by skill and attention in the park itself. Neither
Hyde Park nor the Bois de Boulogne offer any com-
manding range of view ; the delights all lie in the
neatly kept roadway, the flanking lakes and parterres,
the bright, green slopes of shaven turf; at Richmond
Hill or on the Pincian at Rome, on the other hand,
you forget the roadway, you forget the bits of pretty
turflet, you ignore the copses, you are careless of the
odor of flowers, for your eye, carrying all your per-
ceptive faculties in its reach, leaps to the fair vision
of flood and field and trees, which sweep away, in
sun and in shadow, to the horizon.

Undoubtedly if the surface of adjoining country
will permit, it will be far less expensive to establish
a park whose charm shall lie in exterior views than
one whose attractions shall consist in what the pro-
fessional men call (by use of an abominable word) its
gardenesque features. Yet, with such economic pur-
pose, it will never do to go too far in the country.
It must never be forgotten with us that the men of
equipages are by no means the only class who are to
participate in our aesthetical progress ; the town park,
to have its best uses, must not only be within easy
reach by walk or by the street tramway, but it must
have, too, its spaces of level ground to allure the
cricket or the base-ball players. Areas should be

196 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

ample enough to prevent the possible interference of
these sports, (which every sensible township would
do well to encourage,) with the enjoyment of a quiet
drive.

"While there is no need for making the wood of a
public park a complete arboretum, I think that
special care should be taken to give specimens of all
the best known timber and shade trees, and that
these should be definitely marked with their botanical
as well as popular names, so that strollers might come
to a pleasant lesson in their seasons of idleness. The
particular habits of individual specimens and of forest
growths might, I think, be safely and profitably
noted as lending additional interest to them, and
creating a sort of fellowship with the trees. Every
forester knows that oaks and maples of the same
species have yet idiosyncrasies of their own — one
blooming a full fortnight before its neighbor, and
another taking a tawny hue, while its companion is
still in full array of green. In the garden of the
Tuilleries there is a chestnut which enjoys the tradi-
tional repute of showing leaflets upon the twentieth of
March (hence called Vingt de Mars), and the vener-
able old tree, well known to every frequenter of the
garden, has come to have a character of sanctity by
reason of this early welcome of the spring. In a field
within sight of my own door, there is a sugar-maple

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 197

which, by some fault in the planting, or some inherent
defect in the tree, has made little or no growth these
last six years, and which every August — a full month
before the earliest of its companions — takes on a
hectic flush of color, which it carries, with the buoy-
ancy of a consumptive, all through the autumn. This
accident of coloring gives an individuality and in-
terest to the tree which distinguishes it from all its
stalwart and thrifty fellows.

I do not think a town park can ever safely be
mated with a trotting course ; either the trotting or
the park will go under. It is not intended to speak
against trottiug-courses, or greased pigs, or the climb-
ing of greased poles ; but the arena for these sports
is not usually such a one as to entice a quiet family
man to a park drive. Quiet family men are not, to
be sure, very plentiful, and are not much considered
nowadays ; they still subsist, however, in sufficient
numbers to give a stale flavor of respectability to many
of our growing provincial towns, and to shape, to a
certain degree, the municipal improvments. The love
for fast trotters and for trotting matches is so decided
an American taste that a good trotting-course will
become a cherished institution in every town of a
dozen or fifteen thousand inhabitants. Indeed, I
think its establishment may be regarded as a kind of
necessary safety-valve, through which unusual speed

198 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

and the accompanying howls may be worked off
safely without frightening staid old gentlemen whc
keep to the quiet high-roads. A good flat, a good
bottom, and a good amphitheatre of seats, are about
all the requisites of an approved trotting-course, and
anything picturesque in the way of trees or decora-
tive features is an impertinence. There is no fear,
therefore, that the trotting taste will ever have large
interference with the demand for public parks.

It is a common mistake, I think, to imagine that
anything like a finical nicety in the arrangement of
turf or walks or parterres is essential to the perma-
nent and larger utilities of a town park. This, in-
deed, involves great cost, and diverts from lai'ger and
more important ends. A flock or two of South-
Downs, confined by movable hurdles, and under
charge of some custodian, who might have his rural
cottage at the gate of entrance, would keep turf in
very presentable condition. After this, good drain-
age, hard gravelled roads — subject to monthly rolling
— and judiciously disposed clumps of shade, are the
main things ; following upon which, as the town grows
in taste or ability, the parterres of flowers and the
arboretum and conservatory might be superadded.

But quite above and beyond our present question
of treatment is the larger one of gaming, in due time,
possession of available space. No town that counts

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 199

upon its thirty or forty thousand inhabitants within
the next score of years should neglect it. There can
be no loss in its becoming a large landholder within
its own territory. If the charming but costly dis-
guisements of a park cannot be ventured upon at
once, the land may at least be turned over into a
town farm, where the town's poor may be set to the
work of combing down its roughness or preparing it
by slow degrees, earning their own support, mean-
time, for the richer ends in view. The scheme is by
no means chimerical ; scores of workers, through the
less active months of the year, and who are dependent
on the town for partial support, might thus be put to
remunerative labor upon the town property. A
judicious design of a park as a finality upon the land
in question might underlie, in a measure, and qualify
the regular farm labors. A well-appointed drive
might gradually uncoil itself over the hills and
through the cultivated flats, the wood crop out upon
the cliffs, and the flowers unfold in their sequestered
nook's. It seems to me that a park or garden, grow-
ing up in this way by degrees under the tutelage of
the town, not fairly throwing off its economic and
food-providing aspect until the plantations have rip-
ened into fulness, would have a double charm. I
commend the suggestions to such boroughs as keep
their town's poor festering in some ill-ventilated alma-

200 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

house, with limited grounds, in the foulest suburb of
the place.

Burying Grounds.

EVERY considerable town requires, or will
require at no late day, not only fields for the
disport of its living swarms, but other fields (requir-
ing exceptional care of their own) for the interment
of its throng of dead. Indeed, the living can steal
some chance moments of rural enjoyment, by burst-
ing into fields and gardens of their neighbors, or by
plunging into untamed wilds ; but a man cannot steal
a grave : there is no larceny possible to us of some
charming spot upon a neighbor's hill-side where our
bones may rest.

I cannot quite share in what seems to be the
popular disposition nowadays — to make a favorite, if
not fashionable drive of the cemetery. That it should
be beautiful, that it should carry report of the delight-
some things of every season in its flowers, its fading
wealth of leaves, its evergreens, I can well under-
stand. But that it should be made voyant, inviting
chance-comers, offering views of sea or environs,
cheating one into the belief that he is in a well-kept
garden, and not among graves, lured thither by views
or prettinesses of landscape design and not by the

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 201

memories or the sentiment of the place — this is awk-
ward. Hence, it seems to me that a sheltered hill-
side, a glen, a protected valley, are far more appro-
priate than a plain, scalding in the sun, or heights
which invite by a great range of exterior views.
Tastes will differ widely in this regard ; but it
certainly does appear as if the whirl of lively and
clattering equipages day after day along the edges of
the graves of quiet men would make a terribly per-
turbed sleep for them ; and if real grief ever stalk
thither to pay a last melancholy tribute, it must
needs make a sad public exhibition of itself, or prac-
tise a galling reticence.

In dealing with the question of a public cemetery,
adequate to the needs of a growing population — as in
the question of a public park, — our larger towns show
a provoking delay, blinding themselves year after
year to the necessities of the case, and deferring
positive action, until the needed investment assumes
gigantic proportions. There are scores of towns
whose cemeteries are absolutely brimming with the
dead, who yet take no decisive measures for an
increase of the privilege we all sigh for at last — of a
quiet sleep under trees.

Among the requisites for a country cemetery are to
be named, I think, first, a distance not exceeding forty
minutes drive from town ; next, a feasible soil, and one
9*

202 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

not underlaid with ledges. An absolutely dry soil is
also desirable, and a sheltered position : for in the
last tender offices of respect to the dead, we are
exposed to all seasons, and a harsh sweep of northerly
winds adds dismally to the chill of a wintry burial
I think we love to catch, too, in such localities, the
first warm beat of the spring sunshine, and that we
welcome the early violets on graves we know, as we
welcome them nowhere else.

If with all these requirements can be associated
picturesque variety of surface, secluded glens and
pools, where, as in Mount Auburn, water flowers
show their white regalia, it would be well ; but there
should be no sacrifice of the quiet seclusion which
should belong to such a spot to compass the garish
charms of over-nice and pretentious gardening.

Park gardening and decoration is one thing ; that
of cemeteries is quite another. Aims, treatment,
effects, all should be different. Sombre masses of
wood, heavy shadows, these should be present ; above
all things, there should be avoidance of those sudden
surprises and graceful deceits by which gardeners
sometimes win their lesser honors. Great simplicity
of design is also essential, not only as in keeping
with the sepulchral offices of such ground, but being,
to a certain extent, proof against the harm which an
elaborate plan must suffer by injudicious planting in
private inclosures.

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 203

From the fact last named — the giving over of
individual lots to private caprices of planting or
arrangement, no consummate or finished gardening
can, of course, ever be looked for in our cemeteries.
The general effect will be at best spotty, and lack
coherence. The trail of the principal drives or walks,
the establishment of the capital masses of foliage, the
ordering and adaptation of the encircling belt, the
finish and appointments of the entrance-way — these
are the objects which will demand taste and skill for
their happy execution. To twirl a great labyrinth
of serpentine paths through a forest, shaven clean of
its under-brush — to throw rustic bridges over a flow
of sluggish ditch-water, and to construct grottoes
where they sit like mountebanks in the hollows of
the hills, is not good gardening for cemeteries — if it
be good anywhere. If there be great reach of irreg-
ular surface, there should be sunny glades to contrast
with masses of solemn shade. Rustic or other little-
nesses should not pique and arrest attention. The
story of the place should be told in the largest letters
of the gardener's vocabulary and the interpretation
easy — quiet — seclusion — REST.

Something might be said of the character of the
trees which should be planted in these fields of the
dead. The willow is the traditional weeper, and in
place ; but such product of the gardener's art as a

204 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

weeping ash is a terribly starched mourner, and
should be banished as an impertinence. Ah1 curious
and rare exotics, I should say, have no place there ;
unless, like the yew or the European cypress, they
bear some story of association which chimes evenly
with the solemn shadows around. The darker ever-
greens generally, are most fitting; and there is a
variety of the Norway spruce, with long, pendulous
arms, that is one of the stateliest and comeliest and
friendliest of mourners it is possible to imagine. If
the Mediterranean cypress would but withstand the
rigor of our season, its dark plumes, leading up on
either side to the gateway of a tomb, would make a
standing funereal hymn.

Near to Savannah, in Georgia, and upon one of
the creeks making into the irregular shores there-
about, is a cemetery called, if I remember rightly,
Buena Ventura. In old times, any visitor at the Pulaski
used to find his way there, and was richly repaid for
the visit. There was no proper "keeping" to the
grounds. You passed in under a lumbering old gate-
way of unhewn timber ; the paths were not carefully
tended ; there was much of rampant and almost in-
decorous undergrowth ; the tombs were mossy, and
the graves, many of them, sunken ; but great live-
oaks over-reached your path, and from their gnarled
limbs hung swaying pennants of that weird gray

LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS. 205

moss of the Southern swamp lands — festooned, tan-
gled, streaming down — now fluttering in a light
breeze, and again drooping, as if with the weight of
woe, to the very earth. There was something mys-
teriously solemn and grave-like in it. The gnarled
oaks and the slowly swaying plumes of gray told the
completest possible story of the place. Had there
been no tombs there, you would have said that it was
the place of places where tombs should lie and the
dead sleep. I have alluded to the scene only to show
what and how much may be done by foliage and tree
limbs, with their investing mosses, to give character
to such a spot.

Neither the live oak nor the Spanish moss is avail-
able, indeed, in our Northern latitudes ; but there are
various degrees of fitness in the trees at command.
The yew and the compact-headed Austrian pine, and
the balsam fir are always in their sables ; even the
much-degraded Lombardy poplar, in full vigor, car-
ries a ceremonious, self-possessed stifihess not unbefit-
ting ; while the glittering leaved beech, and horn-
beam, on the contrary, with their ceaseless, idle flut-
ter, are the most unseemly of chatter-boxes. The ash,
again, without liveliness of color has great dignity of
carriage, and in its half mourning of autumn purple is
one of the stateliest and fittest of attendants.

I know there is a philosophy which denies the

206 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

propriety of seeking for, or multiplying any solemn
symbols in connection with death, or the places
where the dead lie ; which believes in opening wide
and laughing landscapes around graves, and in smoth-
ering all memory of the short-lived, funeral black
under the gayest of colors. It seems to me, however,
that so far as such a philosophy puts its meddlesome
liveliness upon church-yards and tombs, it is only a
gay hypocrisy. Death is always death; and the
place where the dead lie, always Golgotha. The real
grief that goes thither with its bitterness, will be put
down by no pelting of bright colors, and mock grief
may be mended by what solemnity belongs to the
scene.

We are not to go through the world mourning, it
is true ; but the graveyards, thank God, are only in
scattered places. And if we can spend liveliness and
cheer over all the rest of our ways, we can surely
afford to leave the funereal plumes hanging over the
one little path where we mourn.

V.

URBAN AND A COUNTRY
HOUSE.

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY
HOUSE.

Real Estate Purchase.

WHAT on earth my friend Mr. Urban wants of
a farm of fifty acres, I do not know ; but lie
wants it. At least he says as much ; and I am not
the man to dispute him. I feel assured that when
he gets it, he will grow red in the face over it, and
perspire fearfully, and use language forbidden in the
decalogue, and find his pet Aldemeys, season after
season, very obstinately dropping calves of the wrong
sex, and his steers breaking into his cabbage patch.
I am confident that he will feel persuaded, before
the end of the first year, that all his country neigh-
bors have conspired to fleece him, and that the butch-
ers are all cut-throats — in which opinion he will not

210 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

be far out of the way. Notwithstanding this, which
I have represented to him in the mildest manner pos-
sible, (seeing his infatuation,) Mr. Urban still wants
a fifty-acre farm. Of course, he is no farmer ; and his
idea of a good farmer is of one who raises large vege-
tables, keeps his fences and buildings in Pimlico
order, and owns fine stock. It is, I must be allowed
to say, a somewhat imperfect idea. He has not the
slightest doubt of his capacity to treat land ju-
diciously, and make it produce huge crops at a min-
imum of cost. How he expects to accomplish this, I
do not know ; neither, I think, does he.

Naturally, he does not mean to buy a farm full
of rocks ; on the contrary, he wishes smooth land —
rich, of course, with no uncouth assemblages of
brush — gently undulating withal — giving fine views
— not hard to till, with serviceable buildings upon
it — in a healthy region, convenient to schools, rail-
ways, churches, mills, steamboats, and the world
generally — with ample society in the neighborhood
— plenty of the choicest fruit — abounding in good
spring-water — no incumbrances, and at a very low
price. All this, he thinks, is to be found easily, any
day in the week, and that a moderate sized check
will transfer it to his possession.

There is a little presumption in the thought ;
but, if the advertisements are to be believed, not

iMR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 2 1 1

much. City-bred men have indeed rather a pre-
sumptuous way of regarding those who live and
gain their living by country pursuits.

Think of it for a moment : — Here (in the country)
is your quiet landholder, living in the performance
of a humble range of duties — rearing brown-cheeked
boys, who will make their way to high places of
trust — to generalships, to governorships, by dint of
their sturdy habits of self-denial, and of work, which
have belonged to their early life ; and, on the other
hand, yonder by the gas-lights is your business man
of the city, rearing boys under the shadow of the
Broadway shops, who, by reason of no self-denial
at all, will hardly arrive at the governing even of
themselves (to say nothing of States) ; and yet, such
a person counts it no difficult matter, by the gains
of only a week's profitable venture, to oust the coun-
tryman from his home, and take possession of his
lands. It is lamentable to think that the accomplish-
ment of such undertaking is so easy. An instinctive
clinging to one's home, is a good nucleus for the
growth of orderly virtues. I am not going to enter
into the question as to whether the better man may
grow up under trees, or under brick walls ; it is a
large question ; and there is a leafy side to it, which,
to me, is particularly engaging : but to-day, our con-
cern is with Mr. Urbf ,n and his search and its results.

212 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

As I have said, the advertisements are most
promising — so also are the representations of the
real estate agents, (the most citified of citizens,) who
are loudest in their praises to a new comer — of some
property, dull of sale, which has been a long time on
their books.

And here, I wish to interpose, by way of paren-
thesis, a suggestion — our need of a more intelligent
and trustful real estate agency (so far as relates to
country homes,) than now exists. It should be in
the hands of parties who have lived in the country,
who are familiar with the country, and with coun-
try resources, and country drawbacks, who by travel
and experience are competent to advise, and who
by large intercourse with landholders can put an
inquirer on the right trail. Still further, it is emi-
nently desirable that such party be able to furnish
leading hints for whatever changes may be requisite
— the system of management that may be safely pur-
sued, and to forecast the home which is sought for.
I am by no means suggesting what is impracticable,
or impossible. Older countries have long seen the
advantages of such agency as I describe. A man of
business in London, who after a series of successes
conceives the idea of establishing a country home,
is able to put himself at once in communication with
certain well-known parties, who (though they may

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTR Y HOUSE. 2 1 3

not advertise in the journals,) are understood to be
in correspondence with such landholders as are will-
ing to sell, but entertain a horror of seeing their
homes and lands trampled over day after day by
whatever curious people may obtain a search ticket
from the established and ordinary real estate agents.
A home is a home, even to the humblest ; and to
those whose needs demand a peremptory sale, the
interposition of some adroit agent who makes the
visit of a purchaser appear to be only the visit of a
curious friend, is an immense relief.

Still more important is it that such negotiator be
competent to give advice based upon long experience
and observation. There is many a man, my friend
Urban among them, who, conceiving a longing for
the quietude or other indulgences of the country, has
yet the most dun and vague notions of what he is
really in search of. Is it simply a quiet reach of
garden ground which may supply all the enjoyment
of the lesser fruits ? Is it sea air alone — or mountain
air, simply — without a thought or care of anything
beyond ? Is it shade and trees, and a taste of wild-
ness ? Is it the care of fine cattle and the requisite
attention and expenditure ? Is it a two months'
disport with a model-farm in summer, without much
regard to the returns ? Is it the establishment of a
country home which shall be complete in all its equip-

214 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

ments ? Not one in ten of those freshly smitten with
a desire to purchase a country residence can definitely
say. So much the more need of one who can intelli-
gently, by a few practical questions, interpret their
own wishes to the purchasers themselves and fathom
the full reach of their country longings.

Cost and Returns of Fifty Acres.

A FARM of fifty acres may be a large thing, or it
•£-»- may be a small thing ; small, if remote, and
submitted only to the "hand to mouth" culture of
the average farm-holder ; but large, extravagantly,
if it be favorably placed, and be wrought to the
full measure of its capacity by the best appliances
of agricultural and horticultural art. Yet the appli-
cant at the city offices can form no idea of this dis-
tinction, nor will his queries in such a quarter put
him in the way of arriving at the just grounds of such
distinction. If, on the other hand, such applicant
(Mr. Urban, we will say,) were to address himself to
one of wide experience and observation in such
matters, he would probably say : " My dear sir, do
you wish a fifty acre farm, that shall return revenue ?
Do you wish it as a plaything, for which you will be
willing to pay as much annually as for your opera-box
and its attendant expenses ? Do you wish to engage

MR. URBA N AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. i 1 5

your sympathies in the affair, and demonstrate some
improved method of culture at whatever cost?
Finally, do you wish it as a summer home, enjoyable
— through all the time of leaves and fruitage — and
not a cancer upon the purse through all the remaining
months of the year ? "

Well — not one in ten who talks vaguely about
having a farm — a country place — is prepared to
answer intelligibly and directly such questions. Can
you — who have sometimes thought of giving your
children breathing-room, under trees? Can you —
who have sometimes thought of glorifying your busi-
ness successes in Wall Street, by a tasteful home in
the country ? Can you — publisher, jobber, grocer,
bookseller, tailor — who have some vague notions of
eventually giving dignity to your gains by establish-
ing a home under elms — have you any precise idea
of what you propose ? What limit of land — what
range of landscape — what fertility of soil — what
addenda of convenience ?

I don't think, for a moment, that you have ; I
don't think that one in a hundred has, who amuses
himself in dreamy hours with forecasts of a pleasant
home in the shade of oaks, and hi the midst of corn-
lands, which, in boyish days, he knew — only too well.
The man who is eager for a town purchase of house
or lot, has very distinct notions (ordinarily) of the

216 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

size he covets — the number of rooms requisite — of
the household service he will possibly require, and
of the probable range of his annual costs in maintain-
ing the same. But, with respect to the country,
whenever his aspirations turn in that direction, he is
in a maze. He counts it an indulgence, which, like
city indulgences, has no determined laws of cost ; it
is another opera-box, of which the trees make the
upholstery, and some Killarney manager presents the
bills in brogue. Under these conditions of uncer-
tainty, an intermediate agent, who can interpret in
some measure a man's own indefinite wishes, and by
a few direct, practical questions, reduce his intentions
to form, is eminently needed — one, moreover, who,
by his own experience and observation, can suggest
the costs and capabilities of farm, garden, or country
seat, and enable the purchaser to take a complete
trade view of his proposed enterprise.

To return to Mr. Urban — his negotiations must
be largely through the established real-estate offices,
or by personal reply to the newspaper advertise-
ments. These leave him in a dreary muddle. Those
who have had experience, know why, and how. The
established agencies take no account of an applicant's
tastes, or positive wants, (if he were able intelligibly
to express them,) and are only anxious to make sale ;
the advertisements are naturally exaggerated to a

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 2 1 ^

degree that makes the consequent search a ludicrous
bore. One " charming place " is next to a great
reach of marsh land, where every informant is pale
and quaking with the ague ; another is so beset with
rocks that it would require double the cost of pur-
chase to clear a smooth bit of greensward at the
door.

Such incongruities naturally shock a man of com-
mercial susceptibilities — if he proposes to carry them
to the country with him. Mr. Urban does ; and,
fretted by an accumulation of mischances, and of
misdirections, as well as by not a little conscious
ignorance of his own, appeals to me for certain prac-
tical hints in way of guidance — putting his appeal
indeed in the shape of a rambling talk, which I take
the liberty of digesting into this formulary of ques-
tions : —

1st. How much ought fifty acres of land, with
respectable farm-house, and out-buildings, within
accessible distance — say not over three to four hours
from the city — to cost ?

2d. Will the possible or probable revenue from
such a farm be sufficient to keep it in good order —
best of order, say — so that it shall not become a bill
of expense ?

3d. What crops or treatment will insure such
return, without destroying altogether the picturesque
10

218 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

effects, or requiring me to cut every tree upon the
place ?

4th. Is it possible to secure any decent man, •with-
out too big a raft of children, to supervise such a
farm — live in the back rooms — keep the smell of his
cabbage stews sufficiently under cover, so as to enable
me to enjoy a country home in-doors — (when I wish)
and relieve me of all the fatigue of details ?

5th. Supposing I purchase such a place, and stock
it to my fancy, and reorganize the old house, or
possibly, build a new one, and Mrs. Urban grows
tired of it all, in a year, or two, or three, is there any
hope of my getting back my purchase money and
costs, or a sum ranging within fifty per cent, of the
same?

6th. "What are the best cattle to keep, (supposing
I purchase,) and are any pears better upon the whole
than the Bartletts, and do you know of a maid of all
work, who would milk upon a pinch, and stay away
from mass for a fortnight ; and is the patent churn, on
show at the corner of Broadway and Cedar street,
really a good article ?

7th. Which do you think the best for eggs, the
Brahma Poutras, or the Cochin Chinas, and do they
require much care ?

8th. What do you think of Jersey for a country
residence ?

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 219

When a man's rambling conversation for two or
three hours is capable of digest into such interroga-
tive formula, it is evident that he has some rural
intentions ; and I proceed to reply to such (in behalf
of my friend Urban) seriously and seriatim.

The price of land, within the required distance of
New York, is as variable as the weather. There are
lands within a radius of a hundred miles of the City
Hall, equipped with rocks and trees, which would be
dear at ten dollars the acre, and there are lands
within the same radius, equipped with rocks and
trees, and without architectural improvements, which
would be cheap at two thousand dollars per acre. In
fact, there is no rule for price of land, as prices rule
for other commodities. Lands along the Hudson, for
instance, are valued — for their river views, or, may be,
the social attractions of their neighborhood — at prices
upon which the best ordered cropping would not pay
a rental of one per cent. On the other hand, there
are level garden grounds on Long Island to be
bought at prices on which eight, ten, and even fifteen
per cent, might be made secure by judicious culture.
Within four miles of Edinboro Castle there are grass-
lands which rent, per acre, for one hundred and fifty
dollars a year. Of course, near to great cities, the
rental of gardening or grazing-land, is measured by
the length of lease — if long, it is worth more ; if

220 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

short, it is worth less. In general, I should say that
any easily-tilled, fairly productive land, within three
miles of a good market, (by which I mean any city
of twenty-five to forty thousand inhabitants,) ought,
upon a ten years' lease, to pay a rental of at least
twelve to fifteen dollars per acre. This supposes,
however, full agricultural or horticultural aptitude on
the part of the manager — a qualification which rarely
belongs to city purchasers. If such a purchaser looks
simply to agricultural rental, as a justification of the
enterprise, he can hardly afford to pay more than two
hundred or two hundred and fifty dollars an acre for
lands adapted to easy tillage. But a largely qualify-
ing circumstance lies in the fact that all such lands
near to centres of business, take on annual increase
of value by reason of the growth of the town. In
the last ten years such rate of increase in all thriving
neighborhoods might safely be reckoned at six to
eight per cent, for each twelvemonth. This is, how-
ever, only true of those farm-lands which lie so near
to cities or large towns, as to suggest the outlay of
new roads across them, or a prospective demand for
suburban building lots. In view of this, the sagacious
purchaser of a fifty acre farm will not leave out of
view — if he desires the surest possible increase of his
capital — the attractiveness of the land for building
sites ; and if, as we suppose, his purchase be within

MR . URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 22 1

fifteen to tweiity minutes' drive of a growing city, he
will project his improvements, whether of planting or
grading, with an eye to its ultimate adaptation for
such purpose.

Will the farm revenue of fifty acres pay for care
and keeping ? Most unquestionably, if there be a
reasonable amount of smooth tillable land, and aver-
age fertility, and no woful mismanagement. If,
however, " care and keeping " are understood to
imply the introduction of gravelled walks in all
directions, and trenching for shrubbery, agricultural
returns will scarcely pay for the weeding and the
watering. Luxuries are luxuries all the world over,
and must be paid for out of hand. What I count
legitimate care and keeping, is such management as
shall insure a gradually cumulative fertility to the
cultivated portions, a neat and orderly air to the
necessary buildings and walks, and a gradual but
positive development of those features which con-
tribute most to its attractiveness as a place of resi-
dence.

As for the proceeds of a sudden sale growing out
of disgust with the rural enterprise, I should hope
that a man — or a woman either — might be duly
punished for such vacillation of purpose. 'Twould be
a good ethical result, whatever might be its econom-
ics to the Urban adventurers. Any such quick-

222 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

coining disgust arises, I think, in the majority of
instances, from the lay out of more considerable im-
provements than can be thoroughly kept in hand or
matured : and it is needless to say that no new pur-
chaser will ever pay a large price for gravel walks
overgrown with turf, or gullied by the rains, or for
shrubbery that leads a starveling life in a great en-
compassing circle of foul growth. An inferior plan
completed is always more salable than a grandiose
scheme but half carried out. Again, ornamental
country architecture never brings its cost, save under
very exceptional conditions ; therefore the proprietor
who forecasts a possible early sale, should be very coy
of placing much capital in flamboyant joinery or
expensive walks.

On the other hand, whatever expenditure con-
tributes to the real productive capacity of the land,
whether in the way of drainage, or permanent
fertilizers, or judicious farm buildings proper, will
prompt buyers, and in nine cases in ten, return
its full cost. The man who spends five thousand
dollars in bringing up the revenue of a fifty-acre farm
from four hundred to a thousand dollars a year, is
working upon a safe basis ; but the man who expends
an equal sum in finical equipments of house and
garden, and in the shaping of a great mass of walks
and the planting of exotics — while the land remains

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 223

at its old fixed point of productiveness — may find
buyers who will refund the cost of his whims ; but
the chances are by no means in his favor.

Another large source of disgust with rural under-
takings lies in the difliculty of finding efficient and
honest directing labor. We have in this country no
class of farm bailiffs who, by education and tradition,
know their duties, and quietly perform them. "We
have indeed shipments, from year to year, of stray
specimens of this old country class ; but the demo-
cratic instinct speedily overtakes them — of becoming
directors in chief. As good democrats — which of
course all Americans are — we ought not to regret
this, but it comes awkwardly in the way of a great
many city visions of rural felicitude. Mike, who has
toiled far into the twilight, under the shadows of the
hills of Wicklow, comes deftly and easily into a ten-
hour system, by virtue of which, on some June day
your out-spread hay lies smoking under the evening
dew ; and Bridget, the stout lass, red-armed, and
crimson-cheeked, commended for all work, who has
milked the spotted kine in the folds that border
Killarney, " many a time, and oft," is quick to com-
prehend the American deference for the sex, and
explodes upon you with " Shure ! and it's niver a
woman's work ! "

But, short-comings of subordinates could be borne,

224 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

if we might be sure of the intelligent and faithful
direction of superiors. In fault of this from outside
sources, Mr. Urban, if he insists upon his fifty-acre
experiment, must undertake it himself. And, in that
event — as I hinted at the beginning — I expect to see
him grow fearfully red in the face, and struggle
against his wife's repinings, and yet, through all — if
the rural love be strong in him — work out results
that will be charming in spite of their toils.

As for the pears and the Chittagongs, about
which, if I remember rightly, my friend Urban insti-
tuted some inquiries, I have nothing in particular to
say. Bad fruit is due more to lack of good culture,
than to choice of bad varieties ; let a man select the
best specimens he can find in the city-markets — test-
ing them by taste — secure the trees from a nursery-
man who has a reputation to lose, then cultivate with
care, and he will never lack good fruit.

There is as much dilettanteism in pomology as in
old pottery, or in poetry ; a sound man who wearies
of the dilettanti chooses what he likes, and gives it
protection and reaps his reward. I would as soon
think of choosing my fruits by the advices of the
horticultural disputants, as of choosing my pictures
(if I ever bought them) by the advices of the news-
paper critics. The pomologists stand related to those
who raise fruit for home enjoyment, and under fair

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 225

garden culture, as the lexicographers and philologists
are related to those who use language to enwrap a
sermon or a plea ; a finical nicety, if it engross them,
will be at the cost of vigor and directness of thought.
So of the improved races of poultry. The hen-
fanciers are, I dare say, very worthy people ; far be
it from me to pluck a feather from the tail of any of
their brood. But to my obscure sense, an egg is
always very much of an egg, whatever fowl may have
the laying of it. Nor can I detect much difference
between a " broiler " of the Chittagong, or any other
heathen family, and the " broiler " Bridget may dress,
and lay before me at a June breakfast, from the
cackling company that have always laid and scratched
about the dung-hills of our Christian country. Nay,
I take a rather pleasant entertainment, in fancying my
cheerful and cackling barn-door brood are lineally
descended from those veterans of the British roost,
who, under the name of Chanticleer, have for so
many centuries lifted up their welcome to the morn-
ing. There are family associations which are a source
of pride ; what if my gallant fellow in white, yonder,
with golden legs, and blood-red comb, curveting with
wings down-spread, and giving a coquettish look to
the demure feathered people of his harem, comes in
direct lineage from the alert old Chanticleer of the
House that Jack Built ?
10*

226 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

This is the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven ar,d shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn, etc.

Can we say as much, or fancy as much for an
awkward, frizzled creature of Shanghae name, as
stupid as the celestials with their hair tied into a
cue?

And yet those city gentlemen who have come
newly into possession of fifty acres, or ten acres of
farm land, are prone to distress themselves with the
notion that they have not precisely the right breed
of cattle, or hens, or geese. Their griefs (allow me
to say) — for they will have them — will not rest upon
BO inconsiderable a base as a wrong choice of animals ;
any of God's creatures will be good enough, if they
give them requisite care.

Question of localities.

I PERCEIVE even now that I have not replied
to every query of my friend Urban. " What do
I think of New Jersey as a residence ? "

I know a great many excellent people in New
Jersey — entirely unconnected with its railway system.
I have reason to believe that there are villages in the
retired parts of the State where the houses and door-

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTR Y HOUSE. 227

yards are neat, and where the streets are not filled
with offal and mangy dogs. Fifty acres of land in
New Jersey — soil being equal — will bear as good corn
or rye as in any other spot of our common country
where the sun shines with equal force. I do not
indeed think that " Vineland " is soon to become
our Eden, or that, if we ever have an Eden, it will
lie in New Jersey. If a Euphrates were ever to
spring up in the Highlands, I doubt much if it
could ever cross the Central or the Camden and
Amboy track — without good lobby management.
All this, however, is said jokingly.

There are good farms in New Jersey ; there is
most excellent garden-ground, and — best of all — one
can come from it easily to New York. There is no
reason why its near lands should not become the
paradise of fruiterers, and of vegetable-growers for
the market. Its general surface — short of the moun-
tains, or of the beautiful rolling lands of Monmouth —
does not invite those who look for the picturesque as
well as the practical.

But what boots it, talking of this or that locality ?
If a man has really made up his mind to be shaven, it
matters little on which half of his chin the operator
shall commence. If Mr. Urban, or any other good
friend, is determined to possess himself of fifty acres,
he will undoubtedly have associations which will

228 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

draw him in this or that direction, against all reason-
ing upon the mere merit of the land.

Agriculturally speaking, it does not much matter
where the amateur farmer may go. I do not say this
ironically, but in full soberness. If a man, used to
city life and its lusts, has made up his mind to redeem
himself, so far as he may, by grappling with fifty of
God's acres, and by putting the stamp of his energy
and toil upon them, he cannot go wrong, wherever,
within reasonable distance, the hills and the meadows
are spread out. Earnest work will declare itself
effectively, on the harsh rocky banks of the Hudson,
or upon the unctuous level of Jersey. This much,
however, is to be said practically — the nearer a man
can establish himself to one of those great avenues
of travel — that is, toward Philadelphia, Boston, or
Albany — the more sure he will be of finding sale in
the event of failure, and the more sure of ready and
constant market for whatever produce he may have
on hand.

I aim perfectly well aware that my friend Mr.
Urban (and others of like humor) will insist that he
has no intention of selling out or of marketing ex-
tensively. It is pleasant, however, to feel that we can
do such things if we choose. From my own observa-
tion I am persuaded that the man who has no chance
of selling his country place or his farm is always a

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 229

great deal more eager to sell than the one who has
opportunities flowing upon him weekly. Above all
things, it is imperative that a proprietor who would
enjoy to the full a delightful country place, or a well-
managed farm, should allow others to enjoy it with
him. By which I mean, that his improvements and
successes should be in the sight of people, and not in
some utterly inaccessible locality, out of view and
out of mind.

To plant charming shrubberies and lay down cap-
tivating walks in quarters that no one can reach but
by a break-neck scramble over abominable roads, is
like making a fine speech to empty benches — always
an ungrateful thing to do, as many a good man
knows. Half the charm of the river-bank places
along the Hudson lies in the fact that they, with their
surroundings, really form a part of that great water
highway of travel — gazed upon every summer day
by the world that floats downward and upward
through the mountain gates of the river, dotting the
green hills with lessons which every floating traveller
may read — massing their showy rhododendrons so
that thousands from below and above may see the
pink crown of blossoms. The boat, the car, those
hundred eyes, do not steal away any home-like pri-
vacy ; they equip it rather with a new content — the
content that comes of seeing others enjoy what we

230 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

enjoy and take a pride in ourselves. Never a man
yet, no matter how crotchety or unassailable, who
possessed farm or garden, into whose management
his pride and care had largely entered, but enjoyed
seeing it admired. The eye of the world upon a
man's work is healthfully stimulative. He who
denies it, and plants for his solitary gratification only,
has a weak spot in his head or heart, and deserves to
go crazed in an island-garden. There are charming
places, so far as banks and trees and water view go,
along the far away shores of Long Island, but it is a
long day's journey to reach them over a road where
nobody travels. There are very grateful, inaccessible
nooks in Rockland County, where

" A hermit hoar, in solemn cell,"

might wear out life's " evening gray," very jollily ;
but no man who wants his flowers to catch a new
tint from the reflected grace of fair faces,, wishes to
bury himself there. There are magnificent grazing
farms in the wilds of Greene County, great waves of
rolling hills, great Tors of shaggy, shaded cliff, great
wealth of brooks, purling amid the undulations of the
meadows, great rampant crests of forest growth, with
century-old hemlocks piling out of them their won-
drous pagodas of green ; but who wants the torture
of a drive over the Catskills to enjoy it all ?
Mr. Urban does not, neither do I.

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 23 1

Testimony of Experts.

AT the risk of iteration, and in the hope of throw-
ing all possible light upon the subject under
notice, I propose the examination of a few fifty-acre
farmers, who shall represent respectively the stock-
breeder, the amateur, the business man, the philoso-
pher, the practical man and the trader.

Mr. Urban being in company — in whose interest
the inquiries are made — we first encounter Mr. Up-
den, of Deep-Dale, well known among Committee
men, and eminent at Agricultural Fairs.

His system is simply — to breed cattle of pure
blood. We venture the query — if Mr. Upden's stock
is fed mostly from the land, or if he is in the habit
of buying food ?

Witness. " I buy, I should say, from twenty to
forty tons a year."

Mr. Urban innocently asks if Mr. Upden makes
sufficient butter for the consumption of his family ?

The question is almost resented.

" Butter-making is an annoyance. Six or seven
hundred dollar cows can be put to better uses. I
prefer to buy my butter."

Query. " We are to suppose then, I think, that

232 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the milk of your cows goes to the rearing of your
young animals. Does this prove sufficient ? "

Witness. " In most instances ; we sometimes,
however, purchase native animals to suckle our
choice calves."

Query. " With the milk from two cows, I sup-
pose, you are able to rear a fine oalf ? "

Witness. " That is our intention."

Query. " Is it your opinion that a calf so reared
will be able to sustain itself in good condition with-
out extra feeding for a series of years ? "

Witness. " I do not understand the term ' extra
feeding.' It is our way to give animals whatever
they will eat at whatever cost."

Query. " Is there an active demand for your cattle
from practical farmers ? "

Witness. " Not so large as we could wish. We
sell mostly to breeders."

Query. " Are the prices you receive remunera-
tive ? "

Witness. " We endeavor to make them so ;
though with a large stock on hand we are compelled
to pass off some animals on private terms."

Query. " Have the results been such as to war-
rant you in recommending to a friend a similar
course of agricultural operations ? "

Witness. " If the friend had large capital, and an

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 233

assured income, independent of his land, and had a
taste for fine cattle I think I could do so."

All which is eminently discreet : hut if to a taste
for fine cattle, any rurally inclined gentleman adds a
thorough knowledge of them, and aptitude in the
handling of them, and a keen eye for the apprehension
of their good or bad points, (such as few men are
born to,) he may become a successful breeder. But
to undertake such a business with onJy the flimsy
basis of a love for fine cattle, will prove a very profit-
less venture.

The next witness is a stout man, partially bald,
who carries a bandana pocket-handkerchief and per-
spires freely — John Heaviside, of Three-Hills Farm :
retired from business going on five years.

Query. " Would Mr. Heaviside be good enough
to detail in brief hk system with respect to stock and
labor ? "

Witness. " Well upon my word, there's not much
of a system. I keep a pair of carriage-horses, and a
little roadster for the boys, and a pair of mules, and
a pony and a saddle-horse, and we sometimes hire a
neighbor's oxen. Then there's a cow or two and
their calves ; and there's a foreman, and gardener, ard
coachman, and five out-door hands in the summer."

Query. " What are your crops principally, Mr.
Heaviside ? "

234 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Mr. Heaviside dabs the top of his head reflec-
tively, and replies : " Grass and vegetables, I should
say, mostly ; and fruit — we've plenty of fruit."

Query. " Do the sales meet the expenses of the
place ? "

The witness gives over for a moment his exercise
with the bandana and stares blankly at the questioner.

Query. " You sometimes make sales ? "

Witness. " Oh ! yes — four hundred quarts of
blackberries, for instance, the last season. Upon my
word and honor it's true."

Query. " Anything further ? "

Witness. " Not that I know of. Mrs. Heaviside
could tell better. She claims the sales for pin-
money."

Query. " What would you reckon the probable
cost of maintaining a farm of fifty acres ? "

Witness. " I should put it at four thousand a
year — taking one year with another."

Query. " Have you much shrubbery, and have
you laid down gravel walks ? "

Witness. (Dabbing cheeks and head , with his
bandana.) " Ouf ! miles ! "

Mr. Heaviside, upon being interrogated on that
point, testifies that there is no lack of vegetables ;
indeed, he is of opinion that enough are grown for
ten families ; why so many he is unable to say ; he

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 235

believes the garden was laid out with a view to such
an amount, and of course, it is necessary to keep the
garden planted.

On being asked if he could suggest any more
economic method of management than that at present
pursued he seems at first at a loss ; but being pressed
for an answer " would allow forty acres of the land
to grow up to wood, and drop the gravel-walks."

In the event of putting his farm on the market,
could the witness hope to secure the original price
with the sum for improvements added ?

The witness has his doubts.

" Could he realize the original sum, with half the
cost of improvements added ? "

(His farm is within a half-mile of a very lovely
and stagnant little town of Berkshire County.) Mr.
Heaviside loses his temper and retires, being joined
by a young lady in large hoops, who cheers him
with the sight of a lovely new carnation, and a
charming little assemblage of the new Mathiola
JBicornis.

The next informant is Mr. Limbold, a lithe, wiry
gentleman of great self-possession, and a refreshing
breeziness of manner.

He has purchased a farm of fifty acres within
three hours of New York ; he spends three months
there in mid-summer ; his wife prefers Newport, but

236 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

yields to him in consideration of a fortnight at the
close of the season at the Ocean House. He has not
built — not he ; he has added a wing sufficient for his
summer accommodation. He has not employed a
Scotch gardener — not he. The old owner, a practical
farmer, remains in charge under agreement to share
sales, the owner furnishing half stock and equip-
ments. He transports his household the twentieth of
June ; and by contract, shares the farmer's larder,
adding such private delicacies as he chooses. He
secures all his winter butter and poultry, and makes
sales of the excess, on partnership account, to well-
known dealers. The farm is not a moth to him — by
no means. Returns fully balance the interest ac-
count ; and the farm, lying within three miles of
a thriving city, is rapidly appreciating in value.
In view of this fact, he expends five hundred a
year in such improvements as will make the land
more desirable for suburban sites, and in five years
hence is confident of quadrupling his money.

Mr. Urban, who has wavered under the Heaviside
story, is as cheerfully intent upon his farm as ever.

The next witness is a philosopher and reformer.
He believes in drainage — deep drainage — in sub-soil-
ing, in phosphates, in science, in anything almost
which is told him seriously. The consequence is, he
has bought a farm that no one else would buy, and

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 237

has put contrabands and refugees of various sorts
at work upon it, until he has expended more money
to the acre than was ever expended for agricultural
purposes in Orange County before.

Mr. Creed is asked at what depth he is accustomed
to plant his drains ?

Witness. " Four to five feet ; six feet I think is
better."

Query. " And if you come upon rocks ? "

Witness. " I blast them out."

Query. " And you find a profit in this ? "

Witness. " It's thorough."

Mr. Creed has possibly misapprehended the ques-
tion.

Witness. (Sharply.) "Not at all I can't tell
about profits ; we hear too much of profits ; thorough-
ness is better. Farmers ought to do things thorough-
ly. I try to show them how."

" May we ask," resumes Mr. Urban, " what are
your principal crops, Mr. Creed — those on which you
place your main reliance ? "

Witness. "I am trying at present some experi-
ments with vetches, and a new pumpkin, recom-
mended very strongly by Dr. Newton, of the Agri-
cultural Department. I am also making trial of a
few new grapes. I have still some faith in the Dios-
corea Batata."

238 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Query. " Would Mr. Creed recommend to an
enterprising young man, or to a middle-aged man,
anxious to secure a home, the purchase of a fifty-acre
farm, and thorough drainage of the same ? "

Witness. " I would recommend to an honest young
man to keep as clear as possible of the cities ; country
gains are honest if they are small ; city gains are
devilish."

Query. " Are we to understand, Mr. Creed, that
the means which you have lavished upon your farm
operations are derived from the land ? "

Witness. " I shall be happy, gentlemen, to further
your agricultural investigations ; if you confine your
inquiries to that class of subjects, I shall be glad to
make reply."

Query. " Is it your opinion, Mr. Creed, that a man
of energy and industry, who should purchase a farm
in a retired district, and carry out your system of
thorough drainage and blasting, would lay the base
of permanent pecuniary success ? "

Witness. " I care very little about pecuniary suc-
cess. We hear altogether too much of it. I think a
young man of industry and good habits might secure
a competence by hard work anywhere in the coun-
try ; and with a competency any man ought to be
content. I am inclined to think that I should recom-
mend land with as few permanent rocks as possible."

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 239

Mr. Creed, it appears further, is the owner of
quite a number of pure-bred animals ; but his fences
falling into a bad condition in the course of his
improvements and experiments, (some of these being
in the shape of patent hurdles,) and his neighbor's
male animals being intrusive and aggressive, he is
not quite sure of his calves. His sales, therefore,
have been subject to the discount of the uncertainty,
and have brought only fair butcher's prices. It is
hinted that the adjoining farmers laugh at Mr.
Creed's operations. But in what age have the rustics
failed to laugh at a philosopher ?

We next encounter — in the person of Mr. Sloman
— an eminently respectable man, of the upper part of
Westchester County, who has managed his farm of
fifty acres for the past thirty years.

Query. " Do you find a profit in farming Mr. Slo-
man ? "

Witness. " Waal, that's as folks count profit.
These 'ere chaps that go into heavy wallin' and
drainin' may be don't count profit as we count it.
If I keep my family along, and buildins in repair,
and put up five or six hundred dollars, I call it a
pooty clean thing."

Query. " Would you tell us, Mr. Sloman, some-
thing of your method ? "

Witness. " Waiil, there an't much method to

240 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

speak of. We keep ten or twelve cows through the
summer, accordin' to the season ; if hay is lookin' up,
'long in the fall, we fat an old cow or two, and may
be a pair of cattle. We mean to keep our mowin'
up and put eight or ten acres — 'cordin' to the season
— in corn and potatoes."

Query. " Potatoes are a pretty good crop, are
they not, Mr. Sloman ? "

Witness. " There an't no better crop, if a man is
nigh enough to market to send in a hundred bushels
a day without worryin' his team."

Mr. Sloinan being asked his opinion in regard to
the improved systems of husbandry, replies :

" Waal, I've pooty much made up my mind that
books is books, and farmin' is farmin'. I've nothin'
to say agin these gentlemen that like to spend money
a' ditchin' ; I've nothin' to say agin a good tidy crittur,
and you may call her Durham, or you may call her
what you like. If she fills a pail she comes up to my
idee of a good critter; if she doan't — she doan't.
That's my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong ; but that's my
way o' lookin' at it."

An effort is made to bring back the inquiry to a
niore definite issue by asking Mr. Sloman " what he
thinks about the labor question ? "

Witness. " Waal, good help is ruther skerce."

Your intensely practical man under question —

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 241

unused to formal investigation — is apt to bring
forward the awkward facts that confront him every
day, without measuring their relations. It appears
in the end that Mr. Sloman pays out some four to
five hundred dollars a year for labor — in addition to
his own and that of his boy of fifteen. Reckoning
this at five to six hundred more, it would appear that
the needed labor upon a farm of fifty acres under
ordinary cultivation would be not far from a thou-
sand dollars. Meeting this, and the taxes, and " put-
ting by " some four or five hundred from his returns,
the country proprietor thinks he is doing a very fair
thing. When a man of this stamp is confronted with
such statements as appear from sanguine Western
vineyardists, about a return of six thousand dollars
per acre for land in vines, "prepared with the
plow at a cost of twenty-five dollars the acre," he
simply puts a fresh quid in his cheek, and indulges in
remarks not creditable to the veracity of the vine-
yardist.

I am inclined to think that the real truth lies mid-
way between the parties. Mr. Sloman, with his old-
fashioned habits, is not accomplishing the half that
ought to be accomplished with his fifty-acre farm ;
the not unfrequent extraordinary representations of
vineyard product, on the other hand, I cannot but
regard as palpable exaggerations. I have not the
11

242 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

slightest notion that a vineyard in Missouri — how-
ever exquisite the vintage — wiU return the treble per
acre of the Lafitte estate of Medoc. There have
been exceptionable periods — as in the days of the
Morus Multicaulis fever — when an acre under ordi-
nary cultivation would yield its three or four thou-
sand dollars of profit ; but whoever makes such excep-
tional returns, whether due to wine or mulberry
delirium, the basis of certain and continued horticul-
tural successes, is either blinded by his enthusiasm,
or wantonly misleads.

I record one other fifty-acre experience. Mr.
Stimpson, an active, red-bearded, prompt man, is
understood to have purchased some eight years since,
a farm of some forty to fifty acres, within a couple

of miles of the thriving city of , for the sum of

twenty thousand dollars. Does he recommend a simi-
lar purchase to such inquirers as Mr. Urban ?

Witness. " If Mr. Urban can make as good a pur-
chase— unhesitatingly."

Mr. Stimpson has found his farming profitable
then?

The witness begs to correct a possible misappre-
hension ; his farming was not profitable. He had
undertaken the raising of vegetables ; but he could
never find a grocer or vegetable dealer who would
pay him half price for them ; he undertook the small

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 243

fruits, but between the destruction of baskets, small
prices, or the payment of vagabond berry-pickers
from the town, (who trampled down more in value
than they gathered,) he abandoned that scheme ; lie
thinks he never bought a cow, but he paid one third
more than she was worth, to the shrewd neighbors
who hemmed him in ; if labor was twenty dollars a
month, he could never get it under twenty-five ; his
breeding sows inevitably devoured the half of their
litters, though his watchfulness was constant — (per-
haps too constant.) As for horses, he never bargains
for one now, but he insists that he should have a
spavin or two and the heaves, and by strict insistance
on this, he has the satisfaction of knowing some of
the defects in advance — a satisfaction he never had
until he adopted the rule ; he had undertaken the sale
of milk in a weak moment of resolve, but he found
he was selling large quarts, whereas his rivals in the
traffic were all selling small quarts — he was selling
pure milk, and the neighbors were cooling down their
overheated cans with an infusion of cool spring water.

In short, Mr. Stimpson declares that between dis-
contented and overpaid laborers he could not realize
four per cent, upon his purchase, with his own super-
vision and anxieties, (which were immense,) thrown
into the bargain.

" And yet you would purchase ? "

244 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

" This is the explanation," says the witness ; " the
increase of population and manufactures, has brought
the skirts of the town upon me. I have opened a
new street or two ; I have already sold three very
charming sites at prices which cover all my original
payment, and I have some half-dozen in hand, after
the sale of which I shall still have my homestead
with some four or five acres, which I can afford to
devote to horticultural pursuits ; or if my wife insists
— and when she does insist she insists pretty strongly
— I can retire to town with my investment trebled."

Results of Inquiry.

I HAVE thus brought to view through the vehicle
of an imaginary examination — and in the interest
of my friend Mr. Urban, and similar inquirers — all
the aspects of a fifty-acre farm purchased at the East,
with which I am familiar. The inquiry as herein set
forth, may possibly help him to an intelligible decision.
There may be learned from it, I think — First :
that with unlimited means, and the simple wish to
lavish them in country employments, it matters very
little where a man may establish himself, or what
special whim he adopts — whether for fine cattle, or
horticultural successes ; but he may be assured that

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 245

he will win no confirmed triumph in either one or the
other, without having a personal love for the business
and a knowledge of it, or without employing, invari-
ably, those who do have such love or knowledge.

Second : it may be fairly inferred that a fifty-acre
purchase is not necessarily a bad affair, even if the
purchaser is not personally competent to direct opera-
tions, provided he has the shrewdness to avail him-
self of the experience and good common-sense of
those who have the competency.

Third : it may be learned that all the theories
about drainage, and particularly breeds, and the
blasting away of rocky fastnesses, and the use of con-
centrated manures will avail nothing, except they be
under the direction, and subject to the execution of a
thoroughly practical man, who has an eye to sale as
well as purchase, and to crop as well as tillage.
Philosophers, at best, make doubtful farmers : but
adventurous philosophers whose brains bristle with
theories, and who are without that breadth of knowl-
edge which enables a man to compare theory with
theory and understand remote as well as immediate
relations, make the worst farmers it is possible to
imagine. I have a high regard for our agricultural
newspapers, and think they are doing far more good
than our agricultural colleges (as developed thus far) ;
but there are weaklings, who, finding support from a

246 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

newspaper correspondent for some ill-digested theory
of their own, leap to monstrous conclusions.

Fourth : the inquiries will show that a shrewd,
old-fashioned farmer — no matter where his land may
lie — may make fifty acres yield fair return, and not
involve inordinate expenditure. True, very possibly,
that such as my friend Mr. Urban do not wish to live
as Mr. Sloman lived, or to labor as he labored ; but his
report (which may be well substantiated) is a fair
indication of the possibilities of fifty-acre farming.

Fifth : it is clearly enough demonstrated that
however inapt a man may be at farming or horticul-
tural pursuits, if he have the business forecast to
make purchase of land near to a growing centre of
population, his pecuniary success is made sure. There
is indeed a sort of commercial genius — of low rank it
may be — which consists in simply holding on to land
when the tide of population surges around it, and the
" offers " beat like waves upon it, and spend a great
spray of promise over it.

In view of all these " findings " Mr. Urban can-
not surely be at a loss to regulate his determination.
If his means are large, (as largeness is counted now-
adays,) and he has a love for fine cattle of best blood,
let him — anywhere he will, — import the best animals,
look to their rearing, and he may establish a herd
that will carry away the premiums and give him

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 247

reputation, if they give him no profit. Great repu-
tation may go without great profit, though great
profit hardly ever goes, in our time, without great
reputation.

If he have a fancy for architectural and other
decorations, it may safely be said that fifty acres will
f urnish ample margin for the most riotous expendi-
ture. It is quite amazing indeed — as much to the
proprietor as outsiders — to witness the voracity with
which a small place even — under elegant and mis-
guided direction — will consume moneys. The en-
grossing tastes of the city are not without a capa-
bility in this direction ; but one or two good sand-
banks, a small ledge, a plantation, and artificial ponds
— in connection with a rural taste which is ambitious
without being experienced, will I think absorb money
as easily as any outlets of the metropolis.

I should strongly counsel Mr. Urban, or any
other, who feels this inclination possessing him,
thoroughly to mature his plans before beginning;
there is no rural wasting so monstrous as the waste
of building walls and removing them, or of excavat-
ing valleys and the next summer filling them up. A
few judicious hints at the beginning, based on good
sense and taste combined, may work the saving of
thousands. I am inclined to think that the pleasant
scenes of the Central Park are to be credited (or

248 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

charged) with a great deal of riotous or ineffective
private expenditure : those who have gleaned all
their knowledge of landscape-gardening from that out-
of-door school — a very charming one in many of its
features — have left out of consideration the fact, that
public expenditure knows no economies, and an army
of lazy laborers, dragging at the bosom of the public
treasury, may keep in presentable shape the walks
and drives which would be ruin to a private holder.
The rule of action, as of taste, in public parks, is, to
produce the best effects at inordinate cost : the whole
question of economy, whether of establishment or
future treatment, is eliminated from discussion. With
private holders, on the other hand, the great ques-
tion is, — what effects may be produced at a minimum
of cost for their establishment, and at a minimum
of cost for their future annual keeping.

For these reasons, I think the ruralist who medi-
tates a repetition of a bit of the Central Park upon
his grounds, will sink fearfully in the mire of costs
and of mud. There are charming features in the
Park undoubtedly, but the charming things are, most
of them, underlaid with gold, and will be found to
require a golden watering for a long time to come.

Again, if Mr. Urban or any other farm adventurer
has his chemical or other hobbies which he wishes to
carry out, let him not count implicitly upon his

MR. URBAN AND A CO UN TR Y HO USE. 249

power to uproot in a season all the practices of cen-
turies. There is an obstinacy (after all) in God's soil
and seed-beds which humiliates the wittiest lecturers
or the best adepts at the retort. If he be thoroughly
infected, I only counsel modest expectations — a proper
humanity toward his working cattle, and the ordinary
business foresight of keeping a good balance at his
bank when the bills come in.

If he has neither short-horn nor landscape ambi-
tion, and is not infected with any mania of drainage,
or peat, or Liebig — wishing only the grateful shade
from trees not subject to the visitations of the curcu-
lio, and a sweet bowl of milk to his supper, let him
not be too eager to discard the offices of those old-
style farmers, who, if not adepts in culture, are
adepts in saving.

Finally, if his rural fantasy is only a short-lived
whim that may pass one day — if not from his own
mind, at least from the more sensitive and demon-
strative mind of his help-meet — let him buy where he
can sell. He may be sure that the trees will lose
none of the pleasantness of their leafy rustle if it be
spent on ears that listen more eagerly than his own.
His porches, his arbors, his walks, his fields will
entertain him none the less, if covetous eyes look
over the fence at them. There may be something

very wicked, but there is something very human in
11*

250 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the cheerfulness with which we watch people break-
ing the tenth commandment. Horace has touched
the matter prettily in his satire ; but he might have
added that the merchant is never so contented, as
when he hears the old soldier, or the officer on half-
pay exclaim : " 0 fortunati mercatores ! " And the
country is never more charming than when we read
— and reading, believe —

" Agricolam laudat juris legumque peritus."
When Mr. Urban shall have made the skilful
lawyer covetous of his fruits, his fields, his walks, he
may sell — if he chooses. As I said, we never cease
breaking the tenth commandment and trying to make
other people break it. And pray, who keeps the
other nine ?

Country ITouses and ^Repairs.

WHAT man or woman of us all does not some
time think of a house that shall one day be a
home ? Who does not ponder the subject — forecast
its details — outline its surroundings — invest it with
charms — dally with its image, and give to his imagin-
ings a most grateful acceptance ? For my own
part, I think I began to build, when as yet I stood in
daily fear of the ferule of a school-mistress, and
when, under a knitted Scotch school-cap, there came

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 251

into my brain a delicious jumble of porches and gables
and broad roofs dappled over with the sunlight and
the shadows. I cannot doubt but that very many
others have had much the same experience.

There is a class indeed (not very large, I should
hope) of both men and women, always afloat, who
find all their home appetites in those great caravan-
saries which we call hotels, and whose local attach-
ments must be of a very vague and illusory char-
acter : but I cannot fancy such among my readers —
first, because these have no leisure to listen to what I
may say ; and next, because their sympathies must
be altogether remote from the topics I discuss. I
address myself rather to those who have some day
had thoughts of building houses of their own, and
who have invested the thought with a thousand
homely fancies.

A low, gray, irregular range of buildings with a
multitude of gables, and here and there a turret lift-
ing above them — broad windows blazing in the sun-
light, and windows darkened with trailing festoons
of some wall-creeper — an ample hall of entrance, with
quaint stairway climbing to some landing lit with an
oriel — a blue chamber, a green chamber, an oak
chamber — rambling corridors opening upon yet other
chambers — a great dim garret with the sunlight flash-
ing in through some dormer window upon roof-beams

252 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

hung wi£h dried herbs and gone-by clothing and
wreck of discarded furniture — porches that invite and
protect and throw welcome shadows on the door —
little mantling rooflets of windows that temper the
glare of day, and at dusk break the dark mass of
building with picturesque outlying angles : I think I
have indicated some of the features which belong to
most people's ideal of a country home. But who
makes them real ? who reaches their ideal in any
thing — whether in home, in reputation, or success of
any sort ?

But as regards the country home, what is in the
way ? We will suppose that our friend Mr. Urban
has possessed himself at last of the fifty acres he
sought for ; there is wood, there is water, there are
meadows, and withal there is an old farm-house, the
home of the out-going owner, with its clumps of
lilacs, its bunches of syringa, its encompassing mat
of green sward. Its site is not, may be, precisely the
one that he would have chosen ; but the poor drag-
gled bit of shrubbery and the mossy cherry-trees that
stand near give to it a pleasant homeliness of aspect,
with which any new site with its raw upturned
gravels and fresh-planted shrubs must for a long time
contrast very painfully. Thus the question comes up
— more appealingly every day he looks on it, Will
not the old hulk do with a little modernizing ? And

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 253

the thought of putting a new, jaunty look upon the
old tame outline of building, has something in it that
is very captivating.

This suggests our first topic of discussion — Is it
wise to undertake the repair of an old country house ?
The builder or the architect, eager for a fat job, will
say no : the mistress, with a settled distaste for low
ceilings and wavy floors that tell fearfully upon the
carpets, will say no : but a practical man will be
guided in his decision by the condition of the build-
ing, and by the range of the proposed changes. Two
or three axioms in connection with this subject it
may be worth while to bear in mind. First: it is
never quite possible to make an altogther new house
out of an old one. Second : it is the most difficult
thing in the world to determine in advance the cost
or limit of the proposed repairs to an old country
house. Third : it is altogether impossible to say in
advance that any system of change, however deliber-
ately considered, will prove ultimately satisfactory to
the (female) occupants.

These truisms would seem to count against the
undertaking to remodel an old house : yet there are
conditions which make it eminently wise, as well in a
practical as in an aesthetic point of view.

If, for instance, the walls be of stone or brick, and
not wholly inconsiderable in extent, it would be bad

254 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

economy as well as bad taste to sacrifice them to any
craving for newness. In the brick, if well laid, a
man may be sure of stanchness ; and in the stone,
with the lichens of years upon it, he has a mellowness
of tone which not all the arts of the decorators can
reach. But even upon walls of such material, es-
pecially if they carry the blotches of age, it will
never do to engraft the grandiose designs of the
modern builders. If a country liver be really am-
bitious to match all the pretensions of the latest arch-
itecture in respect of high ceilings and mansard-roofs,
let him begin by pulling down ; but if his aim be of
that finer temper which seeks to qualify what is old
by enlargement of dimensions and by such simple
decorative features as shall add a piquancy to the
wrinkles of age — even as the twist of some sober-
colored ribbbon will set off some be-capped and wid-
owed face more attractively than all the snow-flake
haberdashery that could be devised — let him cherish
all the quaintness that is due to years, and seek only
to magnify and illustrate it by such enlargements as
are in keeping with it, and by such sober adornments
as shall seem to be rather a restoration of old and lost
graces than the ambitious display of new ones. The
thing is feasible. It only wants an eye to perceive
the need, and a courage to discard the flash carpentry
of the day.

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 2 5 5

I beg that I may be not misunderstood. I by no
means intend to say that the country houses of fifty
years ago were in any sense equal or comparable, on
the score of fitness or of taste, to the country houses
of to-day ; but I do mean to say, that if the walls
of such old houses are plumb and true and sound, and
repairs are undertaken, it will be far wiser, and call
for nicer exercise of skill, to carry forward such
repairs with the quaint flavor of the old homely tastes
upon them — thus working out artistic agreement and
adornment together — than it will be to belittle the
old by a shocking contrast, and wantonly dress our
grandame in the furbelows of sixteen.

Again, let me lay down another distinction.
There are old houses which, in any traditional or
artistic sense, are not old houses. They are mere
square boxes of lumber or stone, without noticeable
feature or flavor. Such, if posssible, may be incor-
porated into any new design, without fear or favor ;
none but economic considerations will stand in the
way. But there are others which, without being
accordant in any sense with the artistic designs of
the present day, have yet a character of their own —
a character which any architectural adviser (by the
qualities of his profession) is bound to detect ; and
which (by the niceties of his profession) he cannot
ignore in carrying out his changes.

256 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

I know of nothing which an architect can do
better (in the way of illustrating his real artistic
capacity) than to take hold of one of those old, almost
uninhabitable country houses of forty years ago, and,
without violating its homeliness, graft upon it such
convenient addenda of rooms, porches, halls (gables,
possibly) as shall result in a charming homestead,
in which the old is forgotten in the new, and the
new made racy by a certain indefinable smack of the
old.

For all such renovation, however, as I have hinted
at, stanch walls and sound timbers are essential pre-
requisites. If otherwise — if the examining carpenter
can thrust his scratch-awl eight inches into the sills —
if the posts have taken gradual settlement and the
ceiling shows gaping rents, any effective remodelling
must be of doubtful conomy. Of course there must
be a substitution of new sills, and a splicing of the
posts which will make even wider gaps in the ceiling.
Then comes the pleasant suggestion of the mater
familias that the mantels are awkward and must be
replaced by something new and tasteful. The adroit
mason, being called into consultation, decides that the
chimneys are hardly worth the change, and that a
renovation from top to bottom would give a large
addition of closet room. So the old chimneys come
down, with such dirt and breakage and necessary

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 257

removal of partition walls as are surprising. The
ceilings, too, must needs show ugly patches, and it
would be wiser (the amiable mason suggests) to re-
plaster altogether. There must be new hearths too,
and in place of an awkward patched floor perhaps it
would be better to renew the flooring. This being
undertaken, it is found that the sleepers are awry,
and to make square work the carpenter suggests a
replacement of the flooring timber. This being
accomplished, it is hinted by the observant mistress
that the windows are hardly in keeping, and the
order is given for new frames and sashes. The
doors must needs match the windows ; and next-
there is a sly regret that the plain ceilings should not
have their fretting of a town cornice : and so the
poor old house is gradually dwarfed with a great
burden of pretentious modernisms that it can carry
with no grace. Even the mater familias has at last
her disappointments, and says quietly : " Sylvanus (it
is of Mr. Urban that I write), I think 'twould have
been perhaps better to build a new house."
Un qu estionably.

Site and Material.

BUT if new, what is to be said of site, of material,
of style? Not absolutely upon a hill-top, I
should say, unless there be some great flanking wood

258 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

against the north, or such planting and arrangement
of outbuildings as shall presently secure shelter : not
upon low land either — least of all near to any body
of fresh water which from artificial causes is subject
to great inequalities of level, or which in the heats
of September may show a broad margin of quagmire.
Lakes are very beautiful, and very healthful too, as
God made them ; but when the manufacturers or the
water companies tap them, as they will most persist-
ently in the seasons of least ram, all their charm and
glory go sounding down the sluices.

One would say too that a model country house or
an enjoyable one should be placed upon such lift of
ground as to give a good honest out-look over mea-
dow and wood, and streaks of river (if such can be
compassed). The near sight of the roofs and towers
of a city, too, will give a good every-day feeling of
companionship with the world, without the world's
noises ; and I am not sure but that a spire or two
lifting above trees or among trees will breed a
healthful religious habit in a man — shining always in
his eye — trim, solid sermons — not smirched with the
dust of groundling conflicts, and (unlike many written
sermons) always carrying a good point in them.
There should be also some glimpse, if nothing more,
of one of the world's great highways ; a near railway
is indeed terrific with its din, but if so far away

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 259

that its roar is mellowed by distance, the arrowy
flight of its trains gives a pleasant bit of movmeut to
the landscape. Best of all, for picturesque effect, is
the feathery trail of white vapor which the rattling
monster breathes out and which lies floating after
him like a line of mist over the whole breadth of the
valley-crossing. Such objects as I have indicated for-
bid that feeling of solitude which steals upon one
immured in a scene of absolute retirement. Trees
are never less than trees indeed, and mountains are
always writ over with grand lines ; but after all, it
is a weary silence that only birds break or the mono-
tone of frogs or the locusts. An echo from without,
whether from a bell-tower or the sweep of a railway
train, is a sort of brazen world's voice booming in,
that by contrast makes the bird's notes sweeter, and
the leafy rustle of the trees more beguiling.

Of the material of which a country house should
be constructed I shall say some things which are not
in agreement with prevailing opinions. The use of
wood is almost universal ; and for producing a certain
largeness of effect under limitations of cost, it is by
odds the most economical. The necessary conditions
too of warmth and dryness may be easily secured by
a builder in wood ; and under these circumstances,
where fitness and economy seem combined, it is
hardly reasonable to hope for the substitution of any

260 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

other material than wood. Yet I venture to suggest,
(and shall urge as I best can,) that in a country where
stones abound, and they abound in most of the
Eastern States, they furnish the most fit material,
and their use will subserve a higher if not a more
immediate economy.

Let me test, one by one, the objections which are
commonly urged against buildings for home purposes,
of stone.

First, on the score of appearance : There are
those who object to the rough and unbecoming par-
ticolored surface of a house of stone — who believe
that a " handsome house " (a most destestable collo-
cation of words) must have smooth exteriors, and
submit to the finical niceties of the painters. This,
indeed, is a question of taste, in which all ordinary
reasoning is adrift. It certainly seems to me that
the real beauty of a country house depends not so
much upon nice finish of surface as upon outline, and
the agreement of its general tone of color with the
surrounding landscape. No tint, surely, can be more
agreeable than that of our sand-stones, and the yellow
ochreous stain which belongs to the old cleavage of
the trap-rock is as rich as that of the quarries of
Caen. Then there is the lichened surface of a world
of scattered boulders — their fresh bright cleavage
with its spangles of mica, or the homely brown

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 26 1

weather stains of myriads of dispersed fragments.
And even if agreement of tint be wanting, it is quite
feasible to build of wholly refuse stones in such way
as to admit of a ;; rough-cast " covering of mortar,
which by the simple appliance of lime-wash and
some cheap pigment, may be toned to any color
desired : or, by selection of stones for the quoins and
window jambs, these might show their natural sur-
faces, while the intervals were " rough-cast." A kin-
dred though more decided contrast of color might be
secured by quoins and window trimmings of brick,
while the general surface (sunk two or three inches)
might be treated as already suggested. By these
devices the rudest stones might be worked into a
solid home.

Another method, in which comparatively worth-
less material may be utilized in the construction of
a house, which would have all the warmth and nearly
all the durability of a building wholly of stone, is to
blend the timber and mason-work together — framing
as usual, though with a nice regard to joints and
effective panelling, and after this, building in with
coarse rubble, to be rough-cast on completion, leaving
the timbers exposed. This is the old Saxon country
house, of which many examples are to be found in
the cathedral cities of England, and of which the
Shakespeare house is a notable but very humble type.

262 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Instances of this mode of construction are not
common in this country — scarcely known indeed at
the North ; but quaint specimens are to be seen in
Louisiana and in Florida. By the favor of a friend,
I introduce a little sketch of a very modest building
of this sort in the neighborhood of New Orleans.

I am sure that something larger might be done in
this way, which would have a very racy quaintness ;
and which, with its timber balcony and jutting
rooflets and ample porches might offer a very invit-
ing show. Brick may also be used effectively for the
filling in of such exposed carpentry of the frame ; and
if the timber be given a dark chocolate tint, the con-
trast is very striking and pleasing. I give a sketch of
such a house, the roof covered with shingles, or (bet-
ter still) red tiles ; and the basement of quarry chips.

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 263

^Slfe^Q: < -tV -"vy-
«*«*••£ tf

Aside from those who object to the appearance of a
gtone house, there are many who entertain the very

264 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

current prejudice that such "buildings must needs be
damp. If damp, the dampness must be due to faulty
construction. Nothing more is needed to secure dry-
ness than to " fur off" widely from the stone, and
to allow a free circulation of air between the interior
and exterior walls. In this way not only is dryness
secured, but a degree of warmth in winter, and of
coolness in summer, which no wooden walls can
maintain. In this connection it may be worth while
to note the fact, that the larger part of the civilized
portion of the world have been living in stone houses
for the last few centuries, and they have weathered
the damps pretty courageously.

But the objection to country houses of stone ia
not so much on the score of appearance or of
imagined dampness, as of cost. The great durability
is hardly taken into our American estimates. There
are rural householders who look forward twenty
years — some who look forward fifty years ; but those
who look forward a century and build for the genera-
tions to come, may be counted on one's fingers.
What builder of our day reckons upon the wants or
comforts of his grand-child ? What boy counts upon
living in his father's house ? There are exceptions,
doubtless, but the rule is, dispersion — sale — aliena-
tion ; and not one man in a thousand is shaded by
the oaks that gave shelter to his grandsire. If I

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 265

build a house which is in sound and saleable condi-
tion forty or fifty years hence, what more is needed r

But even under this short-sighted view, is the house
of wood more economical than the house of stone ?
If, as I have hinted, the projector aims at a finical
nicety of exterior surface, there can be no question
that economy is largely in favor of the use of wood ;
but if a man will have the courage to violate conven-
tional tastes in this respect, and be content, nay, be
boastful of a rural residence — if it offer only agreea-
ble outline and afford ample security for all comfort
and elegance within, there is a large doubt if stone,
if readily accessible, be not the more economic
material. A large allowance in its favor is to be
made in view of the fact that the painters' bills must
needs be modest, and that repairs for an indefinite
series of years will be almost infinitesimal. And yet
whatever may be a man's plottings in favor of rude
material, and a resolute indifference to other beauty
of exterior than the natural faces of the scattered
boulders in his fields, it is quite possible that the city
masons, if consulted, will swell their estimates to the
same aggregate that belongs to the nice finish of the
town houses. Every experiment, even in the direc-
tion of economy, is taxed somewhat by reason of its
quality of experiment.

To avoid this tax it would be well to seek out
12

266 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

some trusty and sagacious foreman who could be
brought to entertain some pride in the issue of the
proposed scheme and allow him to select the laborers
through whom it should be carried into execution
on " day's wages." Good country wall-layers, who
have only a little deftness in the use of the trowel,
would be capital co-workers ; and at all hazards, that
riffraff of lazy fellows should be discarded who de-
light in hammering out ten listless hours in deface-
ment of the beautiful natural cleavage of our rocks.

Another matter worthy of full consideration is
the fact that the cost of a stone house increases
rapidly with its height ; the first twelve feet, may be
easily manageable, but the next twelve involve por-
tentous array of scaffolding, and the lifting of large
masses of material: economy would thus seem to
dictate, where stone is employed, low walls and a
large area. Would our country houses lose in pic-
turesqueness or in comfort by such a readjustment of
proportions ?

Form and Color.

THIS leads me to speak of form. The man who
goes up two flights of stairs every night in the
country to his bed, does a very preposterous thing.
If not two, why go up one ? A large compensa-

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 267

tion of country life lies in the possession of space : no
brick wall flanks your rear ; no neighbor's area lies
under your dining-room windows ; ample stretch of
ground for all architectural fancies surrounds and in-
vites you. Why not improve it ? Does character
lie in tallness ? The old Romans — those luxurious
comfort-seekers — understood the charm that lay in a
cubiculum, if not a dormitorium on the first floor ; and
with a door half open (such doors as they had) they
might go to sleep, lulled by the tinkle of a fountain
in the hall. I don't think any of Pliny's villas were
as high as those of a great many (in sight from my
door) who don't know whether he was Greek or
Chinaman.

Of course we don't want, in this age of the worldj
to take oar building fancies from the dead men of
Pompeii or of Tusculum ; and I have only interpo-
lated this allusion to show that a man's dignity is not
necessarily measured by the height of the house he
lives in. All the strong, robber classes of the world,
whenever they have lived in houses, have, I think,
inclined to tall ones. Such were those German
barons who perched their eyries along the Rhine,
and the thievish borderers by the Tweed who have
left us such precious specimens as " Johnny Arm-
strong's Tower." On the other hand, the domesticity
of the old Saxons expressed itself in low, wide-

268 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

spreading buildings, typical of a quiet life, and of a
country abundance that came by peaceful labor.

There are robber classes in our day, and they live
(many of them) in tall houses ; so do a great many
honest people, for that matter. In fact a great fault
of our country architecture lies in its being too am-
bitious : it has indeed come out from that old hid-
eous conventionalism of two stories, white clap-boards
and green blinds ; but it still seeks to startle with
something grand — something that shall tell a noisy
brazen story at the first glance. Yet a fit house
and home — fit for its belongings — fit in size, in color,
in outline (like a man of wholly fit character) — should
win upon you by degrees, charming you at each suc-
ceeding look by some" rare and modest beauties,
which are the more attractive because found only
after intelligent search. A great, gaunt, cumbrous
exterior tells all its story at a glance : you may study
it curiously in search of details, but there is no hearty
interest in the study. But a humbler line of roof, so
humble that we catch sight bit by bit of its peeping
gables, its jutting porches, its low flanking line of
offices — half hid by shrubbery and half warmed by a
blaze of sunlight — this, somehow, by a certain relishy
smack of domesticity belonging to its vague indis-
tinguishable outline and scattered chimney-stacks,
piques all the home-feeling in a man.

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 269

A great house, whose picture we have seen in the
architectural books, we know ; and we admire it
coldly, if we admire it at all. But a lesser one — less

beautiful, possibly, judged by the conventional laws of
the art * — whose quaint assemblage of modest peaks
and outlying offices seems to shadow forth the indi-

* Since the first publication of this book, old conventional-
isms in all that relates to country houses have been largely
upset. There is now to be seen a variety and a freedom of
treatment which would have astonished and bewildered the
builders of twenty years ago : it is not too late, however, to
speak an approving word for those modest exteriors, which
win by reason of their modesties.

270 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

viduality of the occupant, and is invested with a
homely yet cheery quietude — this we admire with a
livelier interest.

If, however, economy in the use of stone for do-
mestic purposes demands comparatively low walls, it
need not cheat us wholly of our chambers. A French
roof, with great perpendicularity to its first pitch,
will give airy height for upper rooms and ample
ventilating space above ; and such a roof, slated in
diamond pattern, will contrast admirably with the
natural surfaces of the boulders below, and the
irregular lines of mortar.

Again, I do not know anything in the laws of
taste, apart from conventionalisms, to which we all
yield so implicitly, which would forbid the placing
of an upper story of wooden construction upon a
ground-story of stone. The idea may be shocking at
first, but I ask the reader to fancy for a moment an
irregular mass of honest stone building of the height
and simplicity I have suggested, pierced with win-
dows of irregular proportions (just where needed
for the best light). Next imagine a wooden structure
of a story in height, with simple sharp pent roof,
relieved by a gable half down its length, placed upon
the stone — overhanging it if you please by a foot in
width and length, with its floor timbers rounded into
the shape of supporting corbels ; then imagine here

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 271

and there a half-dozen of these floor-beams projecting
four feet or more, so as to form a dainty balcony at

gj^tfTP ' I ^WS W i^^c -'

r^n^i^^'-''-^

Borne upper window, supported by simple timbei
braces carried down into the stone-work ; others

272 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

may project still further, to carry the peaked rooflet
of a porch, whose supporting posts shall reach the
ground ; the wooden covering may be of sheathing
arranged vertically, tinted brown to harmonize with
the stone, and the battens of whitish gray to har-
monize with the mortar lines below. The profes-
sional men might call this very inelegant ; but I am
not sure that strict artistic elegance is the best quality
for a home in the country. The best qualities in it
will be those that call out most promptly a man's
sense of domesticity — that suggest easy comfort,
ample room, odd loitering nooks, indefinite play of
fire-light and lamp-light, wide and unpretentious hos-
pitality. Above all things a country house, to have
its best charm, must look livable. I use an excep-
tionable word, but I think readers will catch my
meaning. The mere suggestion — such as tightly-
closed shutters will give — of rooms kept for show,
barred for weeks and months against light and air,
will ruin its charm. Its walls, windows, roof, chim-
neys, must beam with cheeriness. Its porch must
nod a welcome. A terrier frisking through a half-
opened door, a cat dozing on a balcony, a dove
swooping round the gable, will lend more charms by
odds than carefully swept gravel and a statue of
Diana on the lawn. There must be no stiff pairing
of circle against circle, or of hanging basket against

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 273

hanging basket — above all, no such execrahle torn
foolery as iron dogs or wooden puppets. A Greciai
temple for a coal shed, or a small Strasburg minster
for a dog-house, will help largely to make a country
house absurd. Nay, an excess of nicety upon the
walks, as if the spade and roller of the gardener left
it only yesterday and would be there again next
morning, takes off the edge of a true home relish J
even flowers themselves, if piled up in very trim
and very orderly masses, as in the show-rows of a
florist, will lose half their power to lend grace ; still
worse if they are perched in spldierly array along the
porch or veranda, renewed so soon as their bloom
fades, like children never allowed to appear even in
party dress save under promise of keeping still.
Who, pray, can take comfort in lounging upon a
porch, where a careless step may break off some
floweret of a rare cactus, or enjoy a bit of greens-
ward where he fears to knock off the ashes of his
cigar? Who wants to be petrified in a country
house, either his own or another's? I have seen
them before now so terribly fine, so prudishly neat,
so martinet-like in order, that it seemed to me the
very gardeners should be wearing leathern stocks
and pipe-clay : a week of such atmosphere would
drive me mad.

Perhaps I am peculiar in these notions about the
12*

274 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

real homishness of a country place. I know there
are very good and Christian people who never allow
a dog about their premises, or a duck, or a dove, or
a stray dandelion upon their lawn, and who buy
statuary and rustic iron work (always in pairs) for
their grounds, and who keep the front blinds closed,
and who manage to give to their sunniest porch the
look of a church door upon week-days ; but why
such people should come into the country or live in
the country I could never understand. It puzzles me
prodigiously.

I like hugely that good old English word — home-
liness. It ought to have again its first meaning.
Pretty-faced women have corrupted it. It describes
all that is best about a country house. I have ad-
vocated the use of homely material and of homely
methods, believing these are best fitted, judiciously
used, to lend real homeliness to a house in the
country.

Mr. TTrbarfs Purchase.

MR. URBAN has at last positively succeeded in
making purchase of his farm of fifty acres, or
thereabout. It has its undulations, its scattered woods,
its obtruding cliff — in short, a sufliciently varied sur-
face to admit of a certain picturesque treatment,

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 275

w.thout great interference with economic results.
For Mr. Urban is bent upon having his corn-
patch — however much it may cost him ; and bent
upon having his trim lines of carrots, his mercers,
his half dozen or more of fine cattle, and his pastur-
age, where he may watch his Alderneys at their
quiet grazing, or their noontide siesta under the
trees.

I give, on the next page, a drawing of his farm as
it appeared at the time of his taking possession.

The house, A, is reasonably sound, and well situ-
ated, but small. It will admit of temporary repairs and
additions, which he determines upon forthwith. The
barn, _Z?, is wholly unfit for his plans, being small, ill-
placed, and shaky in its joints. He consults me in
regard to the position for a new one, and I advise
him to place it in the edge of the mossy old orchard
(whose trees are nearly worthless), where a little rise
of ground will admit of a cellar underneath both
barn and carriage-house. I suggest also in connec-
tion with it a cow-stable which shall extend west-
ward in order to furnish a protecting lee to his cattle-
yard, and to connect immediately with the fields in
the rear.

The fences are terrible in number, but are for-
tunately nearly all of rails, and can therefore be
placed out of consideration in the new laying out of

276

OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the farm. An exception is to be noted in regard
to the line of enclosure marked 0 upon the diagram,

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 277

which — as well as the fences along either side of the
high-road — are of old mossy boulders, too cumbrous
to be removed without great cost. Mistress Urban
is in despair at this, as she thinks that the partic-
ular fence designated will prevent any breadth to
her lawn. In the interests of economy, however, I
venture to advise that it be left in its present posi-
tion— that it be righted where it shows any bulging
propensities, and promise that in two or three years
at most the greater part of it shall be scn*ened by
irregular groups of shrubbery, and that where its
line is discernible, it shall be mantled with such a
tangled wealth of Virginia creepers and ivy (the
exposure being north) as shall make it worthy its
place, and divide admiration with the half dozen of
mouse-colored Alderneys feeding beyond.

The garden is out of position, besides being upon
a soil ill suited to it. Mr. Urban is moreover urgent
for a " great garden ; " he wishes to prepare one in
the best manner, and means that his standard pears
and dwarf fruits and grapevines shall come in for a
share of the benefit.

I establish it upon the level plateau of land to the
southward of his cattle-yard, giving it the advantage
of shelter from the stables, the cold grapery, the
compost-shed, the hot-house and the hennery — as
will appear by consulting the second drawing of

278

OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

Mr. Urban's fifty acres, after the improvements are
matured.

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 279

The cold grapery is marked F ' ; the hot-house, E^
whose fire, by proper adjustment of one of its flues,
gives warmth to the poultry-house, which (marked
Z>) is immediately adjoining. A sheltered spot for
hot-bed and compost-heap is provided in a position
convenient to the manure deposits of the cattle-yard.
A broad walk, at least eight feet in width, traverses
the garden, and divides near the southern border, to
give place to a picturesque coppice of trees and
shrubs, whose interior border is planted with hardy
and showy herbaceous flowers; these again are
hemmed in every summer-time by a narrower and
exterior border of the gayest of " bedding " plants.
Behind, and to the southward of the garden paling
or hedge is a green lane, serving to connect the pas-
ture-land by the high-road, with the cultivated lands
to the westward, and with the stable court. This
connection may be established, while the west lands
are under tillage, by means of a hurdle fence, which,
shall extend the lane along the west border of the
garden.

The fields marked M and R are, as expressed upon
the diagram, either in tillage or in meadow ; and the
multitude of fences has been done away with. The
southernmost of these two fields is laid bare for
thorough tillage of any character, and its neighbor
to the north has only a protecting belt of wood.

280 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

The enclosure -fi^ having a ledge and an old group
of forest trees in its northwestern angle (offering
admirable shelter), may have its picturesquely dis-
posed orcharding, or may be planted with ornamental
trees, as the proprietor may fancy. In either case,
with a few protective hurdles, it may be cropped by
a score of Southdowns ; but it must be fairly under-
stood that no orcharding will do its best or even its
second best, except it be kept under thorough culti-
vation, and no grass permitted within reach of its
most divergent rootlets.

The walks and entrance drive explain themselves.
The dotted line H T, indicates a view of a distant
village spire, which upon the first diagram, as will be
seen, was entirely cut off by two or three intruding
trees ; and even when these were removed, the view
was sadly interfered with by the mossy wall already
spoken of. To obviate this difficulty I suggested a
gap in the wall thereabout, and the establishment
of a broad rustic gate under whose rude arch the
distant spire would come into sight as through a
frame-work. A rough sketch will give a hint of the
vista.

No pencilling, however, will represent that soft
suffusion of smoky color which enwraps the little
epire and house-roofs, as they come to the eye through
the gap in the sharp dark green of the foreground.

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 28 1

The view to the northeast (in the direction of the
dotted line J"), at the time of taking possession, looked
over a foul marsh lying upon the opposite side of the
high-road ; this marsh received the drainage of all

the elevated ground to the north and west, and its
excess of water leaked away by an indecisive and
intermittent flow through the pasture land marked
P. Under the old regime — as will be seen by recur-
rence to the drawing of the farm at time of purchase
— this pasture served as " meadow," and produced
its annual quota of bog hay. Beyond the marsh and
the highlands which skirted it to the northeast, was
an extremely pretty view of a range of low moun-
tains, some two miles distant, in the lee of which were
to be seen a spire and one or two tall chimneys.
But the unkempt, slatternly marsh-land in the fore-
ground ruined the scene. It might be planted out
indeed ; but an effective planting out would interfere

282 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

somewhat with some of the most picturesque objects
in the distance. I advised a slight excavation of a
portion of the marsh so as to show a little lakelet,
over whose farther arm a rustic bridge might be
thrown — the bridge serving as a portion of the bar-
rier between the area of plaisance ground around the
pond and the pasture beyond. By this device and
adroit disposition of shrubbery, the whole area south
of the high-road would appear from the windows of
the mansion to constitute but one enclosure, within
which the pet Alderneys might be seen cropping the
herbage, or cooling themselves in the pool beyond
the bridge.

Of course such disposition of the matter (which
I have tried to illustrate in the drawing) commended

itself most warmly to Mrs. Urban and to the Misses

Urbans. Nor did the paterfamilias greatly object.

To add still more to the picturesqueness of this

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 283

view across the road, I proposed the introduction of
the gardener's cottage upon the wayside, in such man-
ner that its quaint gable should peep from the trees
upon the right of the scene, and a well-trimmed hedge
of hemlock shut out all sight of the road-way. The
diagram already given will show the position of the
water, the walks, the gardener's cottage, and the
gardener's patch of vegetables — this latter being
quite out of sight from the high grounds by the man-
sion.

It is quite essential to the effectiveness of this
design for the lay-out of the grounds that the public
road be kept in neat and trim condition — so neat and
so trim that the visitor approaching it from the south
(the direction of the nearest railway station), shall,
when he arrives opposite the gardener's cottage
(whose porch must jut upon the highway), involun-
tarily reckon it a gate-lodge of some private domain
into which he just there enters. For the fuller
establishment of this pleasant deceit, the real entrance
gates should be of the simplest and most unpretend-
ing character — as if they were but portions of some
interior enclosures. Whatever grass or shrubs may
grow within the public road after passing the gar-
dener's cottage should be as zealously cared for and
as trimly kept as if they were within the enclosing
wall. One may be assured that the neighboring

284 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

public will never resent such careful keeping of the
high-road, and they may be brought by it, in time
to practise some such picturesque devices on their
own account.

Another hint I think it necessary to drop here.
The lay-out of a place upon paper it is easy to make
very engaging and tasteful ; there is indeed no limit
to the graces of curve, which may be laid down by
an adroit draftsman upon a fair sheet of Bristol
board. But it is a very different matter to establish
the same graces upon the land itself. Unlimited
expenditure may indeed make any surface conform
itself to the curvatures and devices of a drawing.
But the art of arts in landscape gardening is to make
outlay illustrate the beauties of the land, and not to
cramp and deplete the land to illustrate the charms of
the drawing.

Particular curves or undulations of surface, which
may have a most attractive look in a finished land-
scape, may lack very many of the esentials of grace
if transferred to paper, after the ordinary manner of
topographical drawing. If we looked at landscape
effects always from a balloon — if the hills were all
fore-shortened, and the curves of walks or drives all
determinable at a glance, a ground map would be a
very fair guide by which to determine artistic effects.
But the truth is that in nature the hills have their

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 285

perspective ; the scattered trees or coppices are not
mere woolly blotches, but slant their shadows upon
the surface and toss their tops into the sky-line ;
curves are not cognizable in their length, or ease,
or abruptnesses at a glance — we steal upon them by
degrees ; they please by their easy cheatery — by
their unexpected sequence — by such abrupt diver-
sions, even, as have palpable cause in inequality of
surface or obtruding rock or cliff. It is quite pos-
sible, indeed — nay, it is altogether probable that the
curves and devices which are most charmingly effect-
ive in the work itself, may have a stiffness and an
impertinence upon the map which will thoroughly
disappoint.

As cases in point, I remember once looking down
with exceeding interest from the height of some
Italian town (I think in Bologna) upon what seemed
a charming garden ; its curves were full of grace ;
its little coppices were admirably adjusted ; its flow
of walks as happy as a dream ; but when I found my
way to it afterward, by a bribe to its custodian, and
met it upon tame level — the bird's-eye view being
gone — it seemed the baldest of dreary pattern-work
in turf — with no significance in its curves, and no
keeping in its lines.

Again, there was a day when I went wandering
in sun and shadow through the masses of a Scotch

286 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

garden, not far from Hawthornden, with cliff and
brook and water and bridge and tangles of wild-
wood — all so caught by the landscape designer and
so strung along the foot-ways he had planted, that
delight was unceasing; and when I asked for a
sketch of its meandering over that broken surface, it
presented such an array of tame lines, and meaning-
less curvatures and violent crooks as to express
nothing of the grace which on the grounds themselves
flowed over, and made constant enchantment.

A Sunny House.

~T"TT~E will suppose that Mr. Urban is thoroughly
» * satisfied with his garden and grounds — that
he finds his newly planted trees growing apace — that
his Southdowns are all that an accomplished grazier
could desire ; but the old house becomes at last a
weariness. Not because it is old ; nor yet because it
is comparatively small — so small that he has to billet,
from time to time, a bachelor visitor in a little loft
of his tool-house ; but it has no wide and open front-
age to the sun. He insists that the new one, of
which he projects the building out of the rough
material from his cliff, shall have at least a glimpse
of southern sunshine in every habitable room below.

MR. URBAN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE. 287

" I am tired of the gloom of north exposures," he
writes ; " wood-fires are very well, but the blaze of
them is not equal to the blaze of sunshine. Do what
you will with the north side, but the parlor must look
to the south, and the library (of course) and the din-
ing-room, and — without going up-stairs — there must,
if possible, be a billiard- room and a bed-room, looking
the same sunny way. In brief, my notion is, to have
a house with plenty of room, and no north side to it.
Can the problem be solved ?

" I don't care for shape, if it be only picturesque,
and meet the wants I have named above. A con-
siderable slope of the land toward the west upon the
locality I have chosen, (keeping all the old charming
views in leash) will admit of an airy basement at the
western end, and full windows (two of them) to the
south. This would furnish a good spot for billiards,
if you can contrive a respectable stairway down from
the hall ; and if the billiard-room opens out west-
wardly into a special conservatory, where one can
smoke his cigar to kill the red spiders (or green ones,
I forget which), all the better.

" What on earth you will do with the north side
of the house under this ruling of windows and wants,
I don't know. I should say a long picture-gallery,
if I had pictures. What if it were to be a blank
wall with ivies growing over it ? But then there's

288 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the kitchen and laundry, which the mistress insists
must have either western or eastern light — if not
both. Treat the problem as you will, keeping in
mind the coveted exposures — the wish to use up
some of my raw material in the shape of rocks, and
withal, the desire not to make the affair too burden-
somely expensive.

"P. S. — Mrs. Urban wishes a boudoir, which
must have a south look-out too, and mind — no base-
ment kitchen.

"P. S. — Again. Mrs. U. says the laundry
might be in the basement, but not near the billiard-
room, and the dairy must be convenient and cool, and
the kitchen must not be too far from the dining-room,
and no dumb-waiters ; and it would be very nice to
have a veranda for flowers, by the dining-room, and
not to forget the sunny bed-room.

" She wishes a large hall, and well lighted, and
servants' stairs apart, and hopes you'll place the front
door in a protected situation ; (south side, if possi-
ble.) And a good large China closet and butler's
room, very well lighted ; and bath-room convenient,
on the first floor."

Fortunately a considerable slope of the land to
the west admitted of the establishment of laundry and
of larder (adjoining) in the basement of the kitchen
extension, and also of a roomy billiard-room with

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 289

south frontage, and opening westward upon the desired
conservatory.

Of the floor immediately above, and upon the

ground level as one approaches the place from the
13

290 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

east, I give a rough draft, showing the general dispo-
sition of the rooms.

By this it will be seen that every considerable
apartment, including even the boudoir, has a southern
exposure. I give no drawing of any ground -plan,
save that of the first floor, and supplement it only by
a rude perspective sketch of the building, in which
I have endeavored to incorporate some of the hints
already given with respect to the use of homely ma-
terials and the intermingling of a timber framework
with country masonry. One great advantage of this
humble style lies in the fact, that it permits of the
attachment of many of the rural offices (as, for
instance, the ice-house and work-room above, and con-
tiguous dairy) to the main building, without offensive
contrast, — at the same time contributing to the
general effect of the mass of building. Mass counts
for a great deal in a country house and in landscape ;
— most of all irregular mass — which can be compassed
(economy considered) only by associating some of the
exterior offices of a rural home with the home itself.
All this, the rough material, and the simple method
of combining timber framework with a rude tilling-
in of masonry, permits and invites.

Observe that the tall, tower-like building on the
right of the view requires no expensive interior fin-
ish; it covers offices which must be provided in

MR. URBAN AND A CO UN TR Y I/O USE. 29 1

some form. By attachment to the main structure it
gives dignity and extent j and it it be covered with

292 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

graceful, climbing plants, it adds wonderfully to the
general effect.

The outline and the tints of a country house, as
I have already urged, are the great things to be reck-
oned, when we rate landscape effects. It is quite pos-
sible that the finesse and precision of the city architect
will tell no story upon a brook side, or on such slope of
land as Mr. Urban has chosen for his site. Effective
building of a country house wants a picture-maker as
much as architect. First, and chiefest of all, every con-
venience must be supplied — all sunny exposure made
available — all juxta-positions reconciled — all home-
like qualities guarded. Next, the mass of building

must tally with the landscape, and illustrate it with

•

a rich, good color of home. Outline must not be
monotonous or heavy, but varied and piquant : roofs
must gleam a welcome, porches promise hospitality,
and chimney-tops, showing pennants of smoke,
lift up standing invitations.

Conclusion.

HAVING thus presented — as it were, by turn of
kaleidoscope and probably by wearisome re-
petition— all the shades and outlines of the fifty-acre
purchase which my friend Urban has had in mind, I
cannot close without a summing up.

MR. URSA N AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 293

All that I have laid down in way of design,
whether for walks, plantations, or country-house, has
been intended for suggestion rather than literal ful-
filment. Every locality must have its own interpreta-
tion at the hands of the artist. Method must vary —
not only as the hills and the slopes vary, but as the
wants and the tastes of the occupant vary.

There are farms I know, unctuous with an accu-
mulated fertility, and with right lines running athwart
their slopes, which might be converted into charming
park-lands, with every grass-field rounded into a
lawn ; but, to my eye, they would gain nothing, if in
this conversion the economic interests of the holder
were ignored. Land does its best service where it
best feeds our human wants : not necessarily gross
wants, but all wants, — fine as well as gross.

I have endeavored to demonstrate that economic
management need not necessarily offend against the
rulings of good taste. I feel sure that the highest
beauty of landscape will ultimately bring no loss ;
and I forecast confidently the time — perhaps a cen-
tury hence — when all the beauties and all the econo-
mies and all the humanities will be in leash.

Again, a country home will not yield its largest
enjoyments to any who adopt it in virtue of a mere
whim ; there must be love ; and with love, patience ;
and with patience, trust. This mistress who wears

294 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES.

the golden daffodils in her hair, and the sweet violets
at her girdle, and heaps her lap eveiy autumn time
with fruit, must be conciliated, and humored, and
rewarded, and flattered, and caressed. She resents
capricious and fitful attentions — like a woman ; re-
ceiving them smilingly, and sulking when they are
done.

I would not counsel any man to think of a home
in the country, whose heart does not leap when he
sees the first grass-tips lifting in the city court-yards,
and the boughs of the Forsythia adrip with their
golden censers. Many a man mistakes a certain
pleasurable association of his boyish days with the
country, for an earnest love ; it may well be only a
sentiment which will wilt with the scorching heats
of August, and die utterly when the frosts nip the
verdure of the year.

A man may take his business to the country —
whether as manufacturer, stock-breeder, tobacco-grow-
er— and decorate his business with country charms ;
but the retired citizen cannot go there, and find en-
joyment, except he have an ineradicable love for such
charms — except he can read lovingly such books as
those of Walton, or White of Selborne.

In closing, I filch from Walton's pages a verse
by that "excellent preacher and angler," Phineas
Fletcher; there is a heavy British mildew on the

MR. URBAN AND A CO UNTR Y HO USE. 295

lines ; and the countryman bepraised by the poet
would not surely make a very active railway-director ;
and yet the mouldy old British portrait will not serve
badly as a pendant to these Rural Studies : —

No empty hopes, no courtly fears him fright,
No begging wants his middle fortune bite,
But sweet content exiles both misery and spite.

His certain life, that never can deceive him,
Is full of thousand sweets, and rich content ;

The smooth-leaved beeches in the field receive him
With coolest shade, till noontide's heat be spent :
His life is neither tossed in boisterous seas,
Or the vexatious world, or lost in slothful ease :
Pleased, and full blest he lives, when he his God can please.

THE END.

THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
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Series 9482