House and Garden 
yard and the garden. Why 
should it be necessary in the 
small city, the town, and the 
village, where ground is not 
so valuable that it must all 
be covered up, to go outside 
the corporate limits to find a 
tree that one dare sit under ? 
There used to be grape arbors 
and shady corners shut off 
from the street view, where 
my lady of the house in any 
place but a large city could 
take her book or her knit¬ 
ting and commune with her¬ 
self or a friend. Now-a-days 
no one can sit under his own 
vine and fig-tree without mak¬ 
ing an exhibition of himself. 
It is all wrong. Anything that tends to de¬ 
stroy the family exclusiveness, the family 
privilege, the family duty of keeping itself to 
itself, is a mistake. 
The patio is a great family protection; it 
fosters the home feeling and keeps the mem¬ 
bers together. Next to the patio, and an 
outgrowth of it, of course, is the dear de¬ 
lightful garden of New Orleans and other 
AN OLD PATIO NEAR GUADALUPE 
PAT IO OF THE DESERTED MO N ASTE R Y AT MEXICALCINGO 
southern cities, so lovingly described by Mr. 
Cable, and then the old New England gar¬ 
den hedged in by its own growth. 
The stone carving on the multiplied arches 
of many of the public buildings and old mon¬ 
asteries of Mexico is marvellously intricate 
and ornate, and much of it is very beautiful, 
the decorative features of almost all Mexican 
houses being inside and mainly in the patio. 
The patio of tenement houses, 
where great numbers of poor people 
live, are entrancingly picturesque, 
with their many angles and quaint 
stairways, their thronging population 
and bits of bright color hanging up 
to dry—for it is always washday in 
Mexico. The old stone and stucco 
walls are often weather-stained in 
soft brick dust and rose tints, and 
blended creams and mouldy greens 
cover spaces that delight the artist’s 
eye. But unless one has a pot of 
paints and really wishes a fine study 
for a picture, it were just as well not 
to linger in these patio interiors 
where the lower class people dwell. 
The odors are indescribable and can 
only arise from ages of time and 
untidiness. 
Public buildings of various kinds, 
governmental and institutional, have 
more than one patio, often several. 
The national palace in Mexico City 
contains a number of patios, the 
