198 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
October, 1913 
# 
I HOTEL PURITAN fK t 
Commonwealth. eAvenue-^ 
HOUSED—9 
Write for attractive 
,4|jfl booklet with guide 
to Boston# vicinity 
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Where Country 
Life in America 
is made 
DO YOU WANT TO BUILD? 
— Everyone has a definite Ideal of a Home — 
and the great annual Housebuilding Number of 
is published to help you realize 
YOUR IDEAL HOME 
“THE HOUSE EFFICIENT” 
That is what you want that house of yours to be. 
So Phil. M. Riley has rounded up all the latest 
devices for the equipment of a home — right from 
the cellar to the roof. Lighting, heating, telephones, 
floors, refrigerators, water heaters, shower-baths, 
—almost everything you can think of, which has 
been recently improved, comes up for attention, 
and the article is written entertainingly and in 
I anguage that you can understand. 
IF YOU WANT A HOME 
You have probably wondered whether it would be 
best for you to build a new house, buy a new one 
already built, remodel an old house, or rent one. In 
“To Build or Not to Build" 
Henry H. Saylor has gone carefully into this ever¬ 
present question, and he points out the advantages 
and disadvantages of each method. A carefully 
reasoned and very info-ming article, superbly illus- 
rated wilh Lumiere autochromes in full color. 
WHO IS SOLOMON JOHN? 
That would be telling—and we can't. He is a 
well-known author and humorist who built a fas¬ 
cinating house up in Connecticut. He thought he 
would be able to write better than ever there, but 
the lure of Broadway was too great. However, 
though he couldn't live in it himself Solomon John's 
is a remarkably interesting house and you'll enjoy 
reading about the nursery with a quaint barrel 
ceiling and the study at the head of a dark and 
narrow stairway. 
FROM COAST TO COAST 
Two articles on houses in Massachusetts and 
Southern California. The one describes engag¬ 
ingly and with some attention to detail a house in 
Peabody designed in 1800 by Samuel Mclntire, the 
famous architect and most skilled wood-carver of 
Salem. The other tells about a patio house in Santa 
Barbara — a low-built spacious dwelling built some¬ 
what along mission lines but with suggestions of 
Italy, Southern France and Spain. Both articles are 
fully illustrated and placed side by side they become 
especially interesting for the contrast they offer. 
We have described only a few of- the many features of the 
October Housebuilding Number of Country Life in 
America. Here are some others — all illustrated — 
The Reproduction of an Old House which tells how 
to get the old colonial atmosphere as well as form when 
you build. 
Foot Scrapers of a By-Gone Day —-a page of inter 
esting photographs from Frank Counsins' great collection. 
A Consistently Colonial House which describes a a 
particularly successful house in Pennsylvania. - 
And there are the following departments— From a 
Country Window — a new editorial page and .Q 
perhaps the most notable of its kind in America. G 
Better Stock, Dogs, Poultry, The ,<o 
Nature Club, Books for the .aA v / - 
Country Home, Experiment <V/ Dear Sirs. 
Station News. S \ enclose 
Finally the following serials are r\> / , one ^°^ ar f° r 
continued : That Farm, . wh L ch P leas , e send 
The Fruitful Land, / me Country Life in 
Inside the House -fv/ America" for 5 months 
that Jack Built, beginning with the great 
and What the >/ annual Housebuilding number. 
Neighbors Did. / H. 6 -G. 10-13 
4 ° 
ACr Doubleday, Page & Company 
> / Garden City, Long Island, New York 
VALUE $2.05 
lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll 
analysis showed arsenic to be the cause, 
and this was finally located in the dried 
meat scrap, in sufficient quantities to kill 
poultry. Whether it got into the scrap 
by accident or was put in for a purpose is 
problematical. 
Arsenic will destroy flesh or cause it to 
dry and remain so indefinitely, so you can 
draw your own conclusion about the mat¬ 
ter. Some meat scraps are put up for 
swine, and arsenic in such doses as this 
will not injure them but act as a tonic, 
but not so with poultry. A meat scrap 
that is suitable for poultry has an appetiz¬ 
ing smell, others with foul odors should 
be rejected, and never fed to poultry. 
Therefore be careful about buying your 
meat scrap. Don’t be satisfied to see it 
stamped on the bag, “For Poultry,” as 
many are so marked. Investigate by 
chemical analysis or have someone do it 
for you. I believe thousands of chickens 
die every year from this cause. 
A. E. Vandervort 
Some Early Sun-Dials 
A T one time it was quite the fashion to 
carry pocket dials in England and 
he was not much of a man who could not 
tell the time o’ day by a peep at his sun¬ 
dial. A poke-dial was the one in common 
use and was a small cylinder of ivory or 
wood, a stopper with a ring at the top, and 
a gnomon on the side of the stopper where 
it was hinged. When in use one took 
out the stopper and the gnomon turned 
round so it hung over the desired line. 
Travelers of parts were never without 
this poke-dial and in the 15th century 
there were many kinds, all of them port¬ 
able, and as necessary as watches now. 
One of these, somewhat battered and 
made of ivory, is still in possession of de¬ 
scendants of the English Cushings. 
As the simplest forms are the best, so 
the original form of the sun-dial wants 
nothing to make it complete. Architec¬ 
tural decoration has not added to the prim¬ 
itive designs of the first dials. 
There has even been a preference for 
symbolic designs for the sun-dial, and one 
should not have much difficulty in choos¬ 
ing where there are so many. The swas¬ 
tika is the earliest known symbol in the 
world. Some dials show the four seasons. 
The Plon. Whitelaw Reid, of New York, 
had a sun-dial at his country place, at 
White Plains, with the signs of the zodiac 
engraved upon its face, but Maine dials 
are, for the most part, simple in design, 
either old dials transplanted from England 
to grace modern gardens, or else duplicates 
of simple styles of the past. 
Whether in old forsaken gardens or in 
trimly kept plots of bloom, the ancient 
sun-dial and the story that it tells has felt 
the very heart beats of history. The new 
sun-dial is of a happier time. 
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