102 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES. 



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 present 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 incon- 

 gruity ; but let some buxom, round-cheeked, stout- 

 ankle d 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 joinery of 

 the day the endless scroll-work (done cheaply, by 

 new methods of machine sawing) the portentous 

 moulding the arches, whose outlines are from By- 

 zantium or the new Louvre columns whose propor- 

 tions are improved from the Greeks capitals whose 

 fretting sculpture outranks the acanthus. Seriously, 

 I think the carpenters, if left to their own efflo- 

 rescence, nowadays, will out-match the loudest ex- 

 travagances of the milliners. "We seem to have 

 drifted into an epoch of the largest and crudest 

 flamboyance in morals, in brokerage, and in car- 

 pentry. A sober, simple-minded man is worse than 

 lost amongst the new brood of architectural im- 

 provers. 



