AND GROUNDS. 237 



these reasons to violate the usual rule, it is better to do it entirely 

 than by halves ; and by inviting the eye, in entering, away from 

 the front to other views around the house, the latter when seen, 

 as it can be to great advantage from the pavilion and from 

 several points in the pleasure-walk in the rear part of the lawn, 

 will (if in itself pleasing) add the more to the attractions of these 

 walks. 



In concluding this series of designs, we cannot forbear to call 

 attention again to the great advantage that a neighborhood of 

 homes on deep lots, with narrow fronts, has over one of equal 

 population covering an equal area in lots of less depth and more 

 frontage. Narrow frontages enable a community to keep up fine 

 walks and fences in their fronts with less expense to each 

 owner, and thus to add the comforts of city streets to the 

 rural pleasures that await those who court them in the grounds 

 behind the gate. Depth of lots suggests a deep space between the 

 houses and the street, which, by neighborly agreement, opening 

 from one home to another in continuous lawn, and planted with 

 trees and shrubs for the common benefit of all, becomes a broader 

 expanse of embellished ground than is attainable where shallow 

 lots force proprietors to place their residences closer to the 

 street line. Nothing is lost by having the rear part of one's lot, 

 which is necessarily divided by high fences, or walls, from 

 the neighbors, in a long and narrow, rather than a shallow or 

 squarer form. A space forty feet in width, and one hundred and 

 twenty feet in depth behind the house, is more useful for 

 planting, and for domestic purposes, than an area seventy feet 

 square, though the latter is somewhat the largest. The specu- 

 lative habit of cutting up suburban lands into narrow city lots 

 25 x 100 feet, or but little more, destroys all chance of making true 

 suburban improvements. Such lots will only sell to citizens who 

 are either too poor, too cockneyish, or too ignorant of their own 

 needs, to insist on something more ; and cannot be managed so as 

 to attract that class of cultivated and intelligent people who want 

 rurally suburban homes, and not city houses and city habits on 

 the margin of the country. 



