252 OUT-OF-TOWN PLACES. 



hung wih dried herbs and gone-by clothing and 

 wreck of discarded furniture porches that invite and 

 protect and throw welcome shadows on the door 

 little mantling rooflets of windows that temper the 

 glare of day, and at dusk break the dark mass of 

 building with picturesque outlying angles : I think I 

 have indicated some of the features which belong to 

 most people's ideal of a country home. But who 

 makes them real ? who reaches their ideal in any 

 thing whether in home, in reputation, or success of 

 any sort ? 



But as regards the country home, what is in the 

 way ? We will suppose that our friend Mr. Urban 

 has possessed himself at last of the fifty acres he 

 sought for ; there is wood, there is water, there are 

 meadows, and withal there is an old farm-house, the 

 home of the out-going owner, with its clumps of 

 lilacs, its bunches of syringa, its encompassing mat 

 of green sward. Its site is not, may be, precisely the 

 one that he would have chosen ; but the poor drag- 

 gled bit of shrubbery and the mossy cherry-trees that 

 stand near give to it a pleasant homeliness of aspect, 

 with which any new site with its raw upturned 

 gravels and fresh-planted shrubs must for a long time 

 contrast very painfully. Thus the question comes up 

 more appealingly every day he looks on it, Will 

 not the old hulk do with a little modernizing ? And 



