The Picture u Quality of English 
Village Cottages 
By MILLICENT OLMSTED 
(.Photographs by Martha Olmsted Winsord) 
T HE picture quality of the English village is not 
equaled by anything in our own country. 
There is nothing that clings more persistently 
and pleasantly to the memory after a trip through 
England, no matter how hurried, than this incon¬ 
trovertible charm of the English villages. One 
needs not the artistic bias to perceive, to recognize 
and to love their quaint loveliness. They are so 
homely, so domestic, so peaceful, so holy-seeming, 
the culminating point ever being the Gothic tower or 
modern spire of God’s house brooding gently over 
the blessed acre of the dead. 
To analyze the component parts of this acknowl¬ 
edged charm is like pulling to pieces the sweet 
scented blossom. We may see its color and shape and 
count its petals and stamens, but its perfume we can¬ 
not find^and it perishes on the air as we investigate. 
Naturally, their most conspicuous quality has 
been and will be yet for decades, age. Time has 
rubbed off the angles and hard lines of youth and 
crudity, and left the soft tones, the delicate shadows, 
the tempered strength of deep experience, so that the 
merest passer-by is impressed by the romance and 
history manifolded upon the ancient, ivy grown walls. 
Does ever ivy grow so luxuriantly as up their old 
stone or brick faces ? Do moss and lichen ever cling 
“A THATCH LENDS A PHYSIOGNOMY” 
A TYPICAL VILLAGE POST OFFICE 
more tenaciously than to their thick gray tiles or their 
brown straw thatches ? 
No Americans attempt to deny the picturesque 
charm for them in the thatch. However plain a 
house,a thatch lends to it a physiognomy, a character. 
Whether it be straggly and thin, or smooth and 
thick, patched and weather stained or adorned 
with splotches of green and yel¬ 
low moss, it always pleases. Find 
the little windows pushed up un¬ 
der its overhanging fringe! See 
the roses wandering over its 
springy surface! 
The thatches are rapidly dis¬ 
appearing, modern building meth¬ 
ods and hygienic laws having 
read their death sentence. Thank 
fortune, that we who have seen 
them have that joy to remember, 
even if when we go again square, 
hard-edged tiles are set where 
the thick thatch used to cast its 
shadow! 
Then there is the whimsicality 
of arrangement that excites the 
imagination of the stranger. 
Why, why, why, we wonder. Up 
on a knoll, down in the dell 
stand the cottages, immutable, 
while straight on, diagonally, 
round the corner skirmish the 
roads, and little lanes and by-paths 
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