314 STUDIES IN THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



These old houses with a long back roof are not the 

 only picturesque houses among our ancient buildings; 

 but no other style seems to me so truly American. 

 Wherever we journey in New England, we find neat 

 little cottages of one story, some with a door in front 

 dividing the house into two equal parts, some with a 

 door at the side of the front, and a vestibule with a 

 door at the opposite end. It is common, when you 

 meet with one of these old cottages, in the less fre- 

 quented streets in the country, to see an elm standing 

 in front, shading a wide extent of lawn. Sometimes 

 there may be merely an apple-tree or pear-tree for pur- 

 poses of shade. A rose-bush under one of the windows, 

 bearing flowers of a deep crimson, and a lilac at the 

 corner of the garden near the house, are perhaps the 

 only shrubbery. These humble dwellings are the prin- 

 cipal attraction in some of our old winding roads, and 

 they are remembered in connection with many delight- 

 ful rural excursions. The rage that has possessed the 

 sons of the original occupants of these cottages for 

 putting up pasteboard imitations of something existing 

 partly in romance and partly in the imagination of the 

 designer, has destroyed the rurality of many of these 

 scenes in our old country villages. 



Any marks of pretension, or of striving after some- 

 thing beyond the supposed circumstances of the occu- 

 pants of a house, are disagreeable to the spectator. 

 Could the sons of the old-fashioned people who occu- 

 pied these plain dwellings have labored to preserve the 

 simplicity and rustic expression of these, combined with 

 a purer style of architecture, the effect would have been 

 exceedingly pleasing. They have done just the oppo- 

 site of this. They seem to have been ambitious to ex- 

 clude from their houses every thing that would be 



