TECHNIQUE OF BUILDING 299 



CHAPTER IX. 

 THE DRY TECHNIQUE OF BUILDING FOR THE AMATEUR. 



TO build or not to build? Those who answer in the affirmative 

 and have time, taste and coin of the realm sufficient, if they 

 are true philosophers and can brook delays and disappointments, 

 revel in the joy of creating for its own sake, a joy unknown to the 

 portion of humanity that, like the swinging tree moss, catches first this 

 branch, then that in its embrace; parasitical in habit, blowing hot 

 or cold; often unanchored and drifting. The home can be made a 

 permanent anchorage to the most restless mortal, and he who thus 

 creates heels closely that time-honored human who made two blades 

 of grass to grow where one grew before and leaves the world better 

 for his brief advent. 



Intensely interesting is the country house craze breaking out on 

 every hand, giving a sensible excuse for the week-end exodus. It 

 varies from the A. B. C. of living, as seen in the modest, one room 

 bungalow or picturesque Swiss chalet to the luxurious hundred- 

 roomed mansion crowning the hills of Lenox or Aiken ; in design 

 gamutting the world. What a will o' the wisp is Dame Architecture, 

 she who in ancient Greece threw about the rough hewn girder, sup- 

 ported by still rougher and more uncouth pillars, the delicate out- 

 lined tracery of entablature and frieze, Ionic and Doric cap and 

 gracefully fluted column, a beauty of design and construction that 

 bids fair to last forever. 



Line of Succession. 



We read man's progress the world over, from primordial 

 cavern up through hollow tree trunk shelter and tree hut of the 

 African, the Icelander's igloo, the Neolithic pennpit burrow of early 

 England, succeeded by the one room Saxon chimneyless dwelling,* 

 the stone fortress retreat of the cliff dweller, lake-protected dwell- 

 ings of Switzerland, the pueblo of the Mexican or the crude Mayan 

 palace, to the stupendous sheltering walls of a Windsor or a Hohen- 

 zollern, or the graceful and delicate beauty of incomparable 

 Versailles. One's pulse throbs as quickly and his pride in man's 

 achievement rises as high today in the presence of the ruined Pan- 

 theon, that creation of man "Earth proudly wears as the best gem 

 in her zone," as w r hen it w r as first unveiled to acclaiming multitudes 

 centuries ago. 



In America the Romanesque especially of the Eleventh and 

 Twelfth centuries, resurrected and adapted to later needs by Richard- 



*Once lost in a snowstorm in the mountains of Lebanon and rescued by the Bedouin 

 sheik of the village of Kaffir Hauer, I fancied Time had turned back the dial and that we 

 were sleeping on the dirt floor of an English chimneyless hall 



