24 
House & Carden 
empty 
houses 
Y OU associate them with winter, with leaden skies that bring down 
night speedily, with biting dusk wind and the ghostly creaking of 
bare branches overhead. Autumn is past. Summer only a mem¬ 
ory In the cities schools and theatres and shops have opened up and 
all the activity of winter life in town is going full swing. The country 
is forgotten. It is better to forget unpleasant things. Here the noble 
trees and lines of shrubbery, which in summer give houses intimate 
contact with earth, stand gaunt in the fading light. 1 he houses rise 
barrenly from their lawns—houses boarded up and closed for the win¬ 
ter. .Empty houses. 
A melancholy prospect, this countryside from which most of its peo¬ 
ple have fled. Even the abandoned farmhouses along the grass-grown 
side roads up in the hills seem more desolate, emptier. 
Empty houses are terrible things to look upon. 
And yet, there are no empty houses. There can never be an empty 
house. Once a house has been lived in, once its walls have echoed the 
human voice and its threshold known the human football, once its loof 
has sheltered humankind and its window panes reflected the human 
countenance, ever afterward it is peopled. It may stand idle, it maj 
even be abandoned, but its walls still hold that presence of men and 
women and children. You can, if you know how to listen, hear the 
ripple of their laughter and the tread of their feet upon the stairs. 
F OR eighty years this house has stood upon its Connecticut hill¬ 
top, looking eastward over the valley. A carpenter built it for his 
bride. They chose the plans together out of an old book. That 
was before books of bad architecture were printed. He fashioned it 
after a Greek temple, with pillars before and behind, and many win¬ 
dows facing southward. In front of the house he planted the bride and 
groom elms, and their branches still shadow the house. His son, now 
ninety or more, told me these things. 
Then came a farmer who accumulated here an abundant family: 
For years he wrested a living from the unkindly soil of these seven 
acres more or less'. It was he who built the red barn on the hill behind 
the house. Then came an architect, who saw beauty in its neglected 
lines and restored it. Next an artist, who hallowed it on many a can¬ 
vas and laid out pleasant gardens. Then we came. 
Eighty years of sheltering humankind. Eighty years of withholding 
the elements from old folks and young. Eighty years of having its door 
swing back to greet friends. Eighty years have its chimneys curled up 
the smoke of cheerful fires. 
We may lock the door and leave it unoccupied for many months, 
abandoning it to the rats that gnaw the old beams and the frost that 
grips its walls, and still there will be people here. 
It has been a happy place to live in because so many people before 
us have been happy here, so many before us have looked out through 
the tiny panes of this very window to watch Spring come down the val¬ 
ley, to marvel at the purple summer dusks, to see the hills yonder flam¬ 
ing with autumn’s tints, to rest secure inside when the meadows lay 
hidden in snow. 
T HIS materialistic age in which we live is rather apt to set down 
such thoughts as crass sentimentality. And yet it is a fact 
those of us who wish to can be keenly aware of it—that people 
do have an effect on things. We leave our impression on inanimate 
objects. We endow them with some of our own personality. We give 
them a legend and enrich their atmosphere. For good or evil, for 
pleasant memory or for bad, each person who has lived m a house leaves 
something of himself behind in that house. It is his intangible legacy 
to the four walls that sheltered him, his unseen reflection on the win¬ 
dows that gave him light, his ghostly impress on the stairs that took 
him up to rest. . , . 
We are somewhat awed by the chair that Dickens sat in to write his 
novels. We are aware, when we visit Mount Vernon, that the genius 
of the first country gentleman who laid out that place is still evident 
in its pleasant gardens. The devout among us revere things that saints 
have touched and used. Why isn’t it just as natural to feel the presence 
of former occupants in empty houses? 
And if we do, what then? Well, those houses will mean much more 
to us and we can never be entirely alone in them. 
One can rarely feel the same about an apartment as one does about 
a house. Our habit of annually migrating from one apartment to an¬ 
other gives it the same transitory atmosphere as a hotel bedroom. It 
is an expedient, a temporary necessity, a fleeting presence. One can 
scarcely feel that apartments are dedicated to full living. But a house 
with an upstairs and a down, a house with a garden around it and a 
view to look upon, a house with a furnace that you have to stoke and 
with plumbing that gets out of order—ah, that’s a different matter. In 
a house, in even the best staffed house, one has to do some of the work 
himself—and he can’t leave an impression on it unless he does. His 
labor marks it just as much as the potter’s thumb marks the vessel. 
I T is at Christmas time, more than any other, that you can feel the 
presence of erstwhile dwellers in a house. 1 hey seem to come 
back to it instinctively. They see the holly wreath upon the door 
and catch the glimpse of merriment within. 
We all go back to places where we have been happy, and we re¬ 
member them for their happy hours. Time has a kindly way of erasing 
remembrance of those days that were hard to live through. We go back 
to old gardens that we have known in the first warmth of spring and 
the burgeoning of summer. We go back to old houses when the fire is 
lighted on the hearth and the candles blaze upon the Christmas tree. 
I F it were possible, I would like to give a Christmas party to all 
the people who ever lived in this house. I'd have dinner at mid¬ 
day, instead of at a fashionable three o’clock. And there would 
be toddy for the older ones and toys for the young. And those who came 
back would return in that period when they were most happy here. 
The young carpenter would come with his bride, and the farmer with 
his first born before the other seven boys and girls made life hard for 
him, and the architect would be quite young and debonair and the 
artist brisk of step. Each w'ould see the place as they knew it—where 
their labors left off. If, perchance, they saw it as it is today, let us 
hope that to them it will be the sort of place they dreamed eventually 
to make it. Let the elms spread giant branches for the carpenter, and 
the barn be fresh and new for the farmer, let our terrace be well laid 
for the architect and the shadows clear and colorful as the artist set 
them down on his canvases. 
After all, it is their house more than it is ours. They have graciously 
permitted us to share their companionship here. They have willed to 
us, as heirs, the legacy of their dreams. It is for them we hang the 
holly on the door and set the lighted candles in the window. 
