AND GROUNDS. 
237 
these reasons to violate the usual rule, it is better to do it entirely 
than by halves ; and by inviting the eye, in entering, away from 
the front to other views around the house, the latter when seen, 
as it can be to great advantage from the pavilion and from 
several points in the pleasure-walk in the rear part of the lawn, 
will (if in itself pleasing) add the more to the attractions of these 
walks. _ 
In concluding this series of designs, we cannot forbear to call 
attention again to the great advantage that a neighborhood of 
homes on deep lots, with narrow fronts, has over one of equal 
population covering an equal area in lots of less depth and more 
frontage. Narrow frontages enable a community to keep up fine 
walks and fences in their fronts with less expense to each 
owner, and thus to add the comforts of city streets to the 
rural pleasures that await those who court them in the grounds 
behind the gate. Depth of lots suggests a deep space between the 
houses and the street, which, .by neighborly agreement, opening 
from one home to another in continuous lawn, and planted with 
trees and shrubs for the common benefit of all, becomes a broader 
expanse of embellished ground than is attainable where shallow 
lots force proprietors to place their residences closer to the 
street line. Nothing is lost by having the rear part of one’s lot, 
which is necessarily divided by high fences, or walls, from 
the neighbors, in a long and narrow, rather than a shallow or 
squarer form. A space forty feet in width, and one hundred and 
twenty feet in depth behind the house, is more useful for 
planting, and for domestic purposes, than an area seventy feet 
square, though the latter is somewhat the largest. The specu¬ 
lative habit of cutting up suburban lands into narrow city lots 
25 x 100 feet, or but little more, destroys all chance of making true 
suburban improvements. Such lots will only sell to citizens who 
are either too poor, too cockneyish, or too ignorant of their own 
needs, to insist on something more ; and cannot be managed so as 
to attract that class of cultivated and intelligent people who want 
rurally suburban homes, and not city houses and city habits on 
the margin of the country. 
