412 



CRITIQUE ON THE JANUARY HORTICULTURIST. 



cost. Meantime, I may take a ride out to 

 Paterson, and look at it. 



Editorial Note to Critique, page 311. — 

 Not exactly so, my dear sir. I contend that 

 a cellar kitchen, besides being " damp, 

 dark, and dismal," is more expensive, when 

 carried out in all its necessary appointments 

 of closets, scullery, larder, wash-room, &c. 

 &c, with its excavated areas for light, 

 drains, and sinks, than a separate addition 

 to the main house on the ground level. 



It is no apology — gentlemen, who are 

 about to build — for mean and inconvenient 

 kitchen arrangements, to an otherwise 

 agreeable country house, that they cost less 

 than good arrangements. Every house- 

 keeper either knows, or ought to know, the 

 influence of such matters on servants, to 

 say nothing of the inconvenience to them- 

 selves. And besides, what business has 

 any one with " two parlors, and a library," 

 who, to save the expense of appropriate ac- 

 commodations for his servants, is willing to 

 submit to their tracking half a dozen times 

 during every twenty- four hours up and 

 down his front and only flight of stairs, and 

 indecently pens them up together, male 

 and female, in the attic ? No, no. The 

 place for men servants is on the lower floor, 

 or over the kitchen in the rear part of the 

 house, for safety to the premises as well as 

 propriety. The girls may go up stairs, and 

 into the attic, if you have one; and there 

 should be back stairs for that purpose, and 

 for the accommodation of the " chamber 

 work." And one who, professing to live 

 genteelly in the country, cannot afford such 

 accommodation, ought not to build at all. 

 He may buy a house thus constructed, but 

 should alter it at once, as he will soon find 

 it necessary to do, if he inhabits it. If our 

 architects will only get into the way of 

 planning economical upper kitchen struc- 

 tures to their houses, there will be no ob- 



jection on the score of cost to any one who 

 is a correct judge of convenient household 

 arrangement. 



While on this subject of house-building, 

 I may as well say my say out, and make a 

 clean breast of it. There are two sorts of 

 house built in the country by city folk, nei- 

 ther of which have any business there, as 

 in proper keeping with the circumstances 

 and habits of the American people at large. 

 And the first is your " cheap," buckram, 

 show-case affair, flimsily built, after the 

 fashion of some European castle, mansion 

 house, hall, or villa, stuck out, all by itself, 

 like a bishop or a castle on a chess board, 

 and hung all over outside with the ginger- 

 bread toggery of a pretender, and then 

 painted " snuff colour," of any shade, from 

 Scotch "Rappee" to Lorillard's " Macca- 

 boy," having neither good taste nor pro- 

 priety to recommend it — as a great many 

 modern country houses are — apparently 

 without object or purpose, and — of inevita- 

 ble consequence — owned or inhabited in 

 stick condition by no one body for any long 

 time together. 



The other is, your huge, expensive, cas- 

 tellated affair, built by some mushroom of 

 fortune, for the purpose of distinguishing 

 his name, — possessing no personal qualities 

 in himself, wherewith to distinguish his 

 house, and, in the great majority of cases, 

 impoverishing his family or his creditors — 

 as the case may be — by his folly ; and only, 

 in the long run, to his own mortification 

 and misery. The following remarks, which 

 I take from a late number of the London 

 Mark-Lane Express, are so much to the 

 point that I extract them, as infinitely more 

 applicable to this country than to England, 

 where family wealth is more permanent, 

 and landed estates more stable than here : 



" It is so usually a course to begin at the wrong 

 end of a business, that one experiences an almost 



