House and Garden 
ONE OF THE WALLS OF THE STUDIO 
deed, until a visitor suggested that they had 
really bought both sides of the soil. They 
had also purchased incidentally an unob¬ 
structed view of perhaps a hundred square 
miles, and an inexhaustible reservoir of fresh 
mountain air. From the tiny front porch 
of the cottage the view takes in miles of the 
Hudson, and a vast outspreading of the 
wooded mountains. At night commonplace 
Haverstraw twinkles with lights like another 
sky, and the perpetual play of light and shade 
upon moving river and still mountainside 
lends the scene inexhaustible variety. 1 he 
inhabitants of the cottage have but to open 
the door of their little dining-room to feel 
themselves one with the vast 
of heaven, and the ample 
stretch of woodland and water. 
The place is really but a 
laborer’s cottage transformed 
by taste into a charming 
home. Luckily for the occu¬ 
pants of this century, the origi¬ 
nal builder of the last preferred 
two rooms of fair size to three 
or four mere closets, so that 
once within the tiny house one 
has a certain sense of relative 
spaciousness. Dining-room, 
living-room and the smallest 
of kitchens make up the ground 
floor. A great stone chimney 
at each end of the house gives 
an ample fireplace to each of 
the chief apartments. The 
dining-room measures twelve 
feet by thirteen; the living- 
room is of about the same 
dimensions. It had not oc¬ 
curred to the owners and oc¬ 
cupants that their ceilings were 
specially low until the tallest 
man in the family connection 
came a visiting to the place. 
Then it was discovered that he 
could barely stand up in either 
room with his hat on, and had 
to bow his bared head in pass¬ 
ing from one room to the other. 
There was great satisfaction 
when he obligingly consented 
to take his hat off on coming 
indoors. 
Those two rooms are a miracle of com¬ 
pactness. I he oddest little closets open here 
and there, and the main stairway to the half- 
storey above is just like another closet with an 
opening barely two feet wide. The tall 
visitor was almost able to stand on the bottom 
step and view the second storey. No guest 
weighing above two hundred pounds is to be 
entertained overnight, since no such person 
could possibly mount the stairs. A man of 
moderate height can stand erect in the upper 
rooms by planting himself precisely beneath 
the rooftree. What the visitor sees as his head 
reaches the level of the second storey on his 
tortuous way up the main stairs is three little 
fHE LIVING-ROOM FIREPLACE 
136 
