OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES 



and inconvertible. City improvements may 

 be undertaken without long look into the 

 future; errors may be amended as fast as 

 brick and mortar can be piled together; but 

 great trees do not grow in a night, or in a 

 year. In America, we must count upon divi- 

 sions and subdivisions of property. Great an- 

 cestral estates will nowhere be long ancestral. 

 Our republican mill grinds them sharply. 

 Hence we lack, and must always lack that 

 artistic dealing with country estates which can 

 count upon oneness of proprietorship for an 

 indefinite period of years. Better to admit 

 this in the beginning, and let our landscape art 

 take its form accordingly, than to weary itself 

 with imitation of what is feudally and merci- 

 lessly old. Nothing can cheat us, indeed, of 

 the beauty of God's trees and flowers and 

 wood-paths. Nature is as much to the occu- 

 pant of a fifty-acre holding, as to the Duke of 

 Devonshire, or the Marquis of Buccleugh. 

 But half a thousand acres of sylvan glade and 

 of velvety turf cannot be maintained with us 

 from generation to generation as the feeding 

 ground for fallow deer ; it may, however, have 

 such keeping and embellishment as shall fit it 

 for a score of fair homes. Better the homes 

 with cheerfulness in them than the deer-park 

 with want shivering beyond the walls. 



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