1 84 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES. 



together ; but great trees do not grow in a night, or 

 in a year. In America, we must count upon divisions 

 and subdivisions of property. Great ancestral 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 mercilessly old. Nothing can 

 cheat us, indeed, of the beauty of God's trees and 

 flowers and wood-paths. Nature is as much to the 

 occupant 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. 



City and Town Parks. 



office of a park is wholly different from that 

 of a village green ; the same demands do not 



