Rural England 
and plaster, such construction features were not 
materially damaged by the fire, intense as it might 
be; that where roofs and floors were of suffi¬ 
cient strength, the caving in of adjacent build¬ 
ings and other wreckage did not damage them; 
that wherever rooms or portions of buildings or 
stores were cut into small units by really fire-proof 
barriefs, the fire damage was exceedingly limited; 
that wherever elevator shafts or stairways were prop¬ 
erly enclosed, fire did not spread from story to story 
internally; that wherever the internal doors and 
trim of a building were made of metal or other incom¬ 
bustible material, they gave the fire that much less 
fuel to burn and virtually stopped the progress of 
that destructive element, in one case actually pre¬ 
serving the contents of the various rooms of a build¬ 
ing intact; that one building was built of timber 
frame, of so-called “slow-burning” construction, 
and stored with highly inflammable contents but 
was inclosed with a well built brick wall and windows 
glazed with wired glass in metal frames, and though 
surrounded by a hot fire, a violent external attack, it 
was absolutely saved intact and men were at work in 
it the following day, while an exactly similar struc¬ 
ture but a few blocks away, but unprotected exter¬ 
nally by wired glass, was utterly consumed inside of 
forty minutes! 
Now then, these architects have seen all this, the 
results of doing certain individual things well, indif¬ 
ferently or badly. Heretofore, each several thing 
well done has been supposed to impart immunity to 
all else, much as a man wearing overalls or a bathing 
suit and a silk hat imagining he was well dressed. 
With all this before them, I wonder if it is possible 
that in the reconstruction of San Francisco, or in the 
needed reconstruction of our great cities in the sense 
of the term first used in this preachment, I wonder, 
I say, if there is one man with intelligence enough to 
assemble all those various good features in some one 
structure, somewhere, that will indeed and in 
fact be a real, full-fledged and absolutely fire-proof 
building. 
RURAL ENGLAND* 
DROAD roads of admirable surface pass our vil- 
lage on one side. Its long street runs at right 
anglesto the greatest of them. The village is an island, 
an oasis of shady elms, in the midst of an ocean of 
grain; and the grainland is of the deepest and most 
fruitful to be found in England, insomuch that there 
is hardly a hedge or a tree to be seen upon it, for 
none of it must be wasted. In a good harvest, even 
when the grain has not been laid, the tall and close 
straw laughs at reaping and binding machines de¬ 
signed to garner the scanty crops of the American 
and Canadian prairies. It seems, indeed, to be the 
very heart of an agricultural community which ought 
to thrive if any agricultural community can thrive in 
these islands. It has manor-house, parsonages, big 
farmhouses, inns, little shops, and cottages, pretty 
enough to be reproduced without a particle of ex¬ 
aggeration by the scene-painter. The gardens are 
trim and gay; many a cottager grows roses worthy to 
be exhibited at the Temple show. 
Roof, window, door. 
The very flowers are sacred to the poor. 
Yes, and the pity of it is that they are sacred to the 
very poor, to a community constantly underfed and 
constantly underpaid, so that their beauty, and the 
care which it represents, are the more touching. In 
outward scenery, indeed, the village is, like the lady 
in the old ballad, a cheerful hypocrite, meeting the 
world with a smiling face, and it looks for all the 
* An extraordinary revelation of the semi-starvation in which the agricul¬ 
tural population of England exists. From an article by “ Palamedes ” in 
Thg Cornhill Magazine 
world prosperous, tranquil, and typical. Hard by, 
and substantially part of the same community, is a 
hamlet, situate ecclesiastically in another parish, the 
structures in which practice no such hypocrisy, and 
offer no consolation to the most superficial observer. 
In it are a number of spacious houses, eighteenth 
century and earlier, which are being permitted, with¬ 
out shame and without hindrance^ to fall to pieces. 
Fantastic chimneys of red brick, mellowed by age 
and weather, lean in all directions; leaden casements, 
with here and there a pane of cracked glass, with 
ancient catches of beautifully involved ironwork, 
creak as the wind stirs them; walls have huge fis¬ 
sures in them; roofs, of thatch and tiles, are falling 
away piecemeal. The whole is an unspeakably sad 
picture of neglect and desolation; if the village street 
would serve for the scene of a cheerful rustic comedy 
of the type of the “Country Girl,” the hamlet would 
be an appropriate setting for a tragedy of ruin and 
despair. Yet, as a plain matter of fact, the village is, 
if anything, worse off than the hamlet, since houses 
have no feelings and it contains a greater sum of 
human misery. Once it boasted a resident squire, 
who inhabited the beautiful manor-house, farming 
some of his own land, employing gardeners, keepers, 
coachmen, grooms, and indoor servants. But long 
ago the manor-house and its lands passed into the 
ownership of a great and good but distant landowner, 
and here we are on the fringe of a large estate, which 
is never the part best looked after. One of our two 
farmers inhabits the manor-house, living simply, 
but holding land extending over many hundreds, if 
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