254 STATE BOARD OF AGEICULTURE. 



fact may trouble him a little until he determines to forget it, in common with 

 many other puzzling developments of human nature. 



We find by observation that farm houses may be divided into three classes, 

 the ambitious, the comfortable, and the indifferent. These, like the hues of 

 the rainbow, are so very apt to run together that it is exceedingly difficult to 

 determine where one ends and the next begins. The ambitious bouse is gen- 

 erally built substantially after the prevailing fashion of the time, and as it is 

 built so it remains for many decades, being, like garments constructed in the 

 same way, rather difficult to make over. At first it was accustomed to take unto 

 itself the form of a square or oblong structure of stone, brick, or wood, in the 

 latter case invariably painted white, with green blinds, standing near the high 

 road, with only a narrow yard intervening. 



Shade trees were accounted neither useful nor ornamental in those days, and 

 therefore were wanting, and the only flowers were supplied by a few straggling 

 rose bushes and lilac trees which were permitted to run a race for life around 

 the narrow enclosure. Later the classic style came into vogue, it being the 

 fancy of the rural Socrates of that era to retire from his daily labor to a dark 

 and dingy apartment in the rear of a palace of painted pine pillars, modeled 

 after the Parthenon, where Xantippe, his wife, as she wearily prepared his even- 

 ing meal, had much excuse for indulging in a temper worthy of her name. 

 Little mattered it to him that its walls were destitute of ornaments, its windows 

 of shade, that an army of flies as numerous as the locusts of Egypt swarmed 

 around, or that the odor of the frizzling fat of the land lingered there perpetu- 

 ally, when, tilted against the wall in his straight-backed kitchen chair, he could 

 reflect at leisure upon the size and brilliancy of the roses that bloomed upon his 

 parlor carpets, the superior polish, length and breadth of his seven hundred 

 dollar piano, and the spick and span newness generally of the portion of his 

 domicile accessible to an admiring public. 



But the day of the Greek temples passed and that of Gothic cottages came. 

 Peaks, gables, and turrets broke out in all directions ; straight lanes were 

 replaced by circular driveways, and trees were tastefully grouped in the grounds 

 or set in rows outside to indicate the course of the highway by lines of living 

 green. As one good result, the uninhabited portions of the house, intended 

 chiefly for exhibition, shrunk to something like their proper size, and the living 

 rooms crept well around towards the front. 



After this came the reign of the Mansard roof, so speedily rung out by fire 

 bells in all directions. 



The name of the comfortable farm-house is legion, for they are many. Its 

 general is almost indescribable, and it is much to be feared that no specimen 

 whatever of this most characteristic of American productions was on exhibition 

 at the Centennial, In the beginning it is generally a frame dwelling of several 

 rooms. Growling by external accretions it gains an L on one side, a single room 

 on another, a piazza here, a porch there, dormer windows in the roof, or a bay 

 window on the sunniest side till the original nucleus is entirely lost to sight. 

 Frequently it is half concealed from view by shrubbery, and fruit, and shade 

 trees; well-kept flower beds border the paths, and 



" On either hand we see the signs 

 Ot fancy and of shrewdness, 

 "Where taste has wound its arms of vines 

 Kou:.d thrift's uncomely rudeness." 



If we enter we will perceive by the presence of home-made rugs and carpets 



