140 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



Ledges, an English house built around a 12 x 12 foot stone 

 chimney stack, with quaint stair tower, big arched and stone-settled 

 fireplaces, beamed ceilings and timbered and stuccoed interior as well 

 as exterior walls, is unusual, perched on a cliff overlooking a steep, 

 wooded incline, fretted at its base by rock-strewn rapids of the swirl- 

 ing river. 



LEDGES. 



Norman Tower. 



In Norman tower are set the slit windows of mediaeval times, 

 through which feudal lords and their retainers repelled with javelin 

 and bow-gun invading hordes. 



Before speeding northward to Drachenfels, that house of mighty 

 spaces built in the centre of a rare, Long Island Sound-bordered 

 woodland, and ere we leave the undulating meadows and pic- 

 turesque wooded knolls of Hillcrest Manor, we will bid adieu to 

 the patriarch of this group, the old farm house that stood there 

 before swamps were reclaimed and the wilderness of bramble and 

 brier made to blossom as the rose; when the arable land was simply 

 potato patches, corn, and hay fields instead of orchards, vineyards, 

 Colonial and Italian gardens, and country villas. 



In the houses in Hillcrest Manor I tested various modes of con- 

 struction ; a log slabbed building ; an odd design in roofing tile ; stucco 

 in its varied forms, plastered on either wooden or steel lathing ; laying 

 clapboards rough side out and staining as we do shingles; siding 

 with lapped w r hite wood boards twelve inches wide, mitred at the cor- 

 ners; belting side walls with shingle laths over clapboards; shingles 



