RURAL ARCHITECTURE. 



have not only been well considered, but their arrangement is generally such as to command 

 the greatest convenience and least loss of time and labor. The advantage of Mr. Allen's 

 plans for farm-houses, over most of those that have been published in the Agricultural 

 Journals, is very striking. 



As regards the exterior of the designs, we are not so well satisfied. There is a want of 

 substaiice in the construction of the verandas, gables, and eaves, that conveys a flimsy ap- 

 pearance to a farm-house, which is quite contrary to the expression it should have. We very 

 well know that the reason of this is that they are, for the most part, wooden buildings — 

 and that cheapness leads our carpenters to build any thing of wood as light as possible. 

 Having constructed several wooden buildings on a somewhat contrary principle — making 

 all the thin lines twice as thick as usual, with the greatest improvement in appearance and 

 expression, we cannot but feel that cheap carpentry will always have a tendency to de- 

 grade the character of all our rural dwellings, so long as they are of wood. While wood 

 is cheaper than brick or stone, of course we must submit to this state of things — and it 

 is not, perhaps, unfitting to the still unsettled condition of our new country, that its first 

 dwellings should be of wood. But we miss in all our wooden farm-houses, that substan- 

 tial, solid, real look, that harmonizes so well both with rural life and pastoral scenery, 

 and which is always felt on seeing farm-houses well built of honest solid stone or brick. 

 Any one who has seen English form-houses, or some of the best specimens in Pennsylva- 

 nia, will at once understand what we mean.* It is the difference between froth and es- 

 sence — between flimsy make-shift and genuine fact. But this is, (at least in the country) 

 our wooden age, and Mr. Allen, as well as the majority of us, must accept it as such, 

 and build and live, for the time and generation, in wooden houses. But we would counsel 

 the farmers who can afford it, to give their wooden houses some appearance of solidity. 

 Let them thicken the eaves, make the veranda posts solid and heavy, and have no light 

 fancy work — and so eschew all those ghostly scantling apparitions of dwellings that rise up 

 under the saw and chisel of very cheap contracts all over the country. 



Mr. Allen touches upon every thing that relates to the inside and outside of the house 

 or the farm, and if his straight forward, pithy remarks, will only be taken for their full 

 value, by the wives and daughters of the class to which he belongs, we shall speedily look 

 for a new and more healthy pulsation in the social heart of the masses of the people. 

 Having been preaching the same kind of doctrine for some time past ourselves, we need 

 not say that we most cordially agree with all our author says in the following remarks on 

 " house and cottage furniture:" 



" House and Cottage Furniture. — This is a subject so thoroughly discussed in the 

 books, of late, that anything which may here be said, would avail but little, inasmuch as 

 as our opinions might be looked upon as " old-fashioned," " out of date," and " of no 

 account whatever," — for wonderfully modern notions in room-furnishing have crept into 

 the farm house, as well as into town houses. Indeed, we confess to altoge'her ancient 

 opinions in regard to househould furniture, and contend, that, with a few exceptions, 

 " modern degeneracy" has reached the utmost stretch of absurdit}', in house-furnishing, 

 to which the ingenuity of man can arrive. Fashions in furniture change about as often as 

 the cut of a lady's dress, or the shape of her bonnet, and pretty much from the same 

 source, too — the fancy shops of Pare, once, in good old English, Paris, the capital city of 

 France. A farmer, rich or poor, may spend half his annual income, every year of his 

 life, in taking down old, and putting up new furniture, and be kept uncomfortable all the 



* The common prejudice against the old stone or brick houses, on account of their dampness, is of no moment in a 

 house, the walls of which are firred off. 



