40 
House 
& Garden 
In the living room of what was 
once a box stall the owner’s 
ingenuity created sand walls 
and flame colored silk curtains 
as a background for colorful 
furniture 
ADVENTURES IN QUAINTNESS 
Which Led To a Community Country House, To a Canal-Side Cottage, 
To a City Courtyard and Finally To a Box Stall 
ETHEL DAVIS SEAL 
S OME day I look forward to my own 
broad portals and the eaves of a red roof 
low hung, tall chimneys and a row of 
sentinel lombardies; but before a roaming 
spirit has found beyond 
doubt its Innisfree, where 
peace comes dropping slow 
into the bee-loud glade, it 
has been my good fortune 
always to have happened to 
live in quaint places. Hum¬ 
ble spots for the most part 
I might call them, as one 
counts worldly goods, but 
rich for me in artistry and 
beauty, costly in charm. No 
conventional, walled-in, 
tight apartments, no com¬ 
pactly built up rows, no 
Victorian mansions of the 
blessed, have seen these my 
gay adventures in roof- 
treeing, but in every one of 
them there has been a wall 
left open to imagination, a 
hearth fire holding dreams 
and visions, a road that 
curves from the door to¬ 
ward unexplored and cheer¬ 
ful venturings. 
Anyone can share with 
me my penchant for un¬ 
usual places; anyone can 
cast care aside and live the 
simple life where, mentally 
or actually, winds sweep 
free through open spaces, 
blowing away such cob¬ 
webby conventions as there 
must be room for the china 
closet, that it would never 
do to cut the carpets, that 
the garden planted by the 
brook would never thrive on the inexperienced 
tending of erstwhile city folk, that one would 
be forgotten of one’s friends. Or, urbanly in¬ 
clined, one need not fear to seize and sign the 
Quaintness dwells in the byways of the city—in those remodeled nooks made livable 
by a few changes. In this city apartment house the dwelling back of it is annexed 
by a clever sunroom passage 
lease of the huge, balconied studio-room apart¬ 
ment with tall windows facing the no longer 
fashionable square. It is, at any rate, as beauti¬ 
fully open and green as it ever was, and un¬ 
doubtedly more paintable, 
with its occasional straggl¬ 
ing loafer and its skyward 
business buildings looming 
palely in the twilight. 
Quaintness is an asset, a 
distinction, even when 
cloaking the kind of fine 
economy that is a reversal 
to proper standards that do 
not allow of lavishing every¬ 
thing on the front doorstep, 
a reversal of all sorts of 
pretense and display. With 
the determination to cast 
these from one forever and 
to be systematically and 
beatifically quaint, there will 
come the knowledge that 
one’s friends lap up quaint 
settings like cream, and 
that an awed and lamblike 
world will promptly follow 
one’s leadership and camp 
on one’s most original trails. 
After dark one evening, 
while candles twinkled in 
the windows of a straggling 
New England farmhouse, I 
knocked on its latticed door. 
My bag and baggage, suffi¬ 
cient for four summer 
months, surrounded me on 
the stoop; perhaps I quaked 
a little at finding myself 
alone at the portal of the 
only spot I had been al¬ 
lowed to come on this first 
gay venture; and being im- 
