

TAliKS AMI rLKASUKK-r.UoUNDS. 



not enough to overcome the novelty of a new one. We see the population diminirth- 

 ing in the very heart of the finest agricultural district in America, wliere nothing is 

 so much nceiled aa human beings. It is at certain seasons imj>o?sible to procure 

 laborers enough to do the work. This stale of things is unfavorable to the perfect 

 development of the country's resources, and equally unfavorable to the attainment of 

 a higher and happier social condition. 



It is not unreasonable, we trust, to expect, and even to urge, some reform on this 

 point. Make home attractive; — cultivate the taste, and feelings, and affections, as 

 well as you do your fields. Why shouUl a wealthy farmer, with his 50, 100, or 200 

 or 300 acres of land, content himself with a rod or two of a door-yard, and a dozen 

 of shade trees, shaped and managed after the precise fashion of a village plot? Why 

 can he not, just as well, have a park and j)leasureground of several acres around his 

 house, broad glades of lawn, and groups of trees, separated from the cultivated por- 

 tions of the farm by green hedges? This, with a well-stocked orchard and good 

 ample kitchen-garden, would come up to our ideas of a country home; and it would 

 be impossible for children to grow up in such a liome without becoming attached to 

 it, and having their tastes expanded, their feelings refined, or without appreci- 

 ating the comforts and blessings of a country life. A rod or two of a door-yard for a 

 farm-house! — what a mockery ! There is something incongruous in the very look 

 of it that can not fail to strike every observing person ; it wants what the lamented 

 1>0WNING called '■'local truth" in architecture, which he explains in this way : 



'■'■Local trutli in arcliitocturc is one -wLich can never be neglected without greatly injur- 

 ing tlie effect of country houses. And yet, such is the influence of fashion and false taste, 

 and so little do the majority of citizens trouble tlieniselves to think on this subject, that 

 notliing is more common in some parts of the country than to see the cockneyism of three- 

 story town bouses violating the beauty and simplicity of country life. In our own neigli- 

 borhood there is a brick liouse standing in the midst of gardens and orchard, Tvldch has a 

 front and rear pierced with windows, but only blank Avail at the sides ; looking, in fact^ 

 precisely as if lifted out of a three-story row in a well-packed city street, and suddenly 

 dropped in the midst of a green field in the country, full of wonder and contempt, like a 

 true cockney, at llie strangeness and dullness of all around it. During a drive on Long 

 Island, last autumn, we saw with pain and mortification, the suburban villa of a wealthy 

 citizen, a narrow, unmistakable ' six-story brick,' which seemed, in its forlornness and utter 

 want of harmony with all about it, as if it had strayed out of town, in a fit of insanity, and 

 had lost the power of getting back again. 



"To give an expression of local truth to a country liousc, it sliould always show a ten- 

 dency to spread out and extend itself on the ground, rather than to run up in the air. 

 There is space enough in the country ; and because a citizen has lived in town, where land 

 is sold by the square foot, and where, in consefjuence, he has to mount four pair of stairs 

 daily, it is surely no reason why he should compel himself to do the same thing in the 

 country. Indeed, economy in the first cost of a house (that is to say, the lessened expense 

 of building two stories under the same roof and over the same foundation) is the principal 

 reason why most country liouses are not still more ample, extended, and rambling on 

 surface, than they usually arc." 



