60 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



country housewife's mind gets to be of the wall-paper 

 sort, rather than of the landscape sort artificial 

 and conventional. Not living with the birds, she 

 comes easily to the monstrous crime of wearing our 

 winged allies for personal adornment. Study the 

 place where you propose to build until you know ex- 

 actly all there is around you that you can gather into 

 a home (gather with your eyes and your ears), then 

 plan your house to let this in and not to shut it out. 



There should be not only wide verandas, but bal- 

 conies and windows that are bayed to the light 

 never for ornament or show, but always for use. A 

 sun-bath window to the east and a sunset window to 

 take in the glow of evening to the west are natural. 

 Let in the first rays of the vital morning and gather 

 to yourselves the mellow sweep of gold at evening. 

 Our relation to the sun's rays is hardly appreciated. 

 We feed by absorption as well as by digestion. It 

 is a good thing to let the sunlight touch us all over 

 as often as possible; by no means shut it out of the 

 house. Associate yourself with the light. 



Your best property in this world is not your mead- 

 ows and your pastures, your cornfields and your or- 

 chards, but that property of yours which is much 

 farther away, in the valleys, or even in the skies. 

 Nothing is more absurd than a few windows slashed 

 into a house anywhere and looking nowhere in par- 

 ticular, and even these shrouded with dust-collecting 

 curtains. Glass is not half enough used in our 

 houses. The whole east front of many a country 



