4 HOME AND GARDEN 



and all ways of working according to local tradition 

 are necessarily lost. The Londoner has to take the 

 great baulks of foreign timber as they come from the 

 merchants' stacks, and shape them with the pitiless 

 steam-saw ; the timber then passes through several 

 hands, each working a different machine at every stage 

 of its conversion. The very atmosphere of the crowded 

 London yard, with its fussy puffings of steam, its 

 rumble, roar, and scream of machinery, the many sub- 

 divisions of processes of manipulation, all seem calcu- 

 lated to destroy any sentiment of life and character in 

 the thing made. And what have we in the end ? A 

 piece of work that, though it has the merit of mechani- 

 cal precision, has lost all human interest ; it follows 

 the architect's drawing with absolute fidelity, but is 

 lifeless and inert and totally unsympathetic. 



I am far from wishing to disparage accuracy or 

 technical perfection of workmanship, but in the case 

 of structural timber that forms part of a house of the 

 large cottage class such as mine, and in a district 

 that still possesses the precious heritage of a traditional 

 way of using and working it, such mechanical perfec- 

 tion is obviously out of place. 



Then there is the actual living interest of knowing 

 where the trees one's house is built of really grew. 

 The three great beams, ten inches square, that stretch 

 across the ceiling of the sitting-room, and do other 

 work besides, and bear up a good part of the bedroom 

 space above (they are twenty-eight feet long), were 



