OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES 



feature which I have made the subject of this 

 paper, to assume an air of modest grace, in 

 place of the present indecorous exposure of a 

 wanton. 



But let no one suppose that porch-building, 

 as applied to the homely lines of a staid old 

 house of thirty or fifty years since, can be 

 safely given over to the judgment of our pres- 

 ent ambitious carpenters. Ten to one, they 

 will equip a barren simplicity with an odious 

 tawdriness. A town-bred girl will slip into 

 the millinery bedizenment of the town haber- 

 dasher without making show of any odious 

 incongruity; but let some buxom, round- 

 cheeked, stout-ankled lass of the back country 

 adopt the same, and we laugh at the enormity. 

 In the same way, every man of a discerning- 

 taste must smile derisively at the adornment 

 of an unpretentious farm-house with the 

 startling decorative features of the shop join- 

 ery of the day — the endless scroll-work (done 

 cheaply, by new methods of machine sawing) 

 — the portentous moulding— the arches, whose 

 outlines are from Byzantium or the new 

 Louvre — columns whose proportions are im- 

 proved from the Greeks — capitals whose fret- 

 ting sculpture outranks the acanthus. Seri- 

 ously, I think the carpenters, if left to their 



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