OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES 



If the ceilings are low, and the beams show 

 here and there the generous breadth and depth 

 of timber which old-time builders put into 

 their frames, cherish these remembrances of a 

 sturdier stock than ours; scrub and paint and 

 paper as you will, but if the skeleton be stanch, 

 and no dry rot shake the joints or give a sway 

 to the floors and ceiling— try, for a few years 

 at least, the moral effect of an old house. It 

 can do no harm to a dapper man from the city. 

 It may teach his wife possibly some of the 

 humilities which she cannot learn on Broad- 

 way. With a free, bracing air whistling 

 around the house corners, and here and there 

 an open fire within, low rooms are by no 

 means poisonous; and if the trees do not so 

 far shade the roof as to keep away the fierce 

 outpourings of a summer's sun, and the low 

 chambers carry a stifling air in August, it is 

 only necessary, in many instances, to tear 

 away the garret flooring, and to run up the 

 chamber ceilings into tent-like canopies, with 

 a ventilator in their peak— to have as free cir- 

 culation as in the town attics. And such 

 tented ceilings may be prettily hung with 

 French striped papers, with a fringe-like bor- 

 der at the line of junction of the vertical with 

 the sloping wall — in such sort that your mili- 



50 



