House and Garden 
and its bench is a lyric poem in itself. 
And beside it the so-called modern 
bench, a triumph of merely technical 
skill, made of iron bent in tree-lines, 
HOW TO BUILD AND HOW NOT TO BUILD A STAIRWAY 
page 139. A railing, a flat roof, a trellis to 
support the vines and in it a table on straight 
feet, a bench and outside the open country. 
Crude this may be, but in its elements it is 
good. Or, in another picture, on the same 
page, we find a garden-house in the woods, 
built of trellis-work, with a secure roof that 
admits no rain, but 
without side-walls, in 
order to let the air 
through. 
The simplest rest¬ 
ing place is naturally 
the bench, and what 
pretty and ugly 
benches do we find ! 
Look at the bench on 
page 140, built around 
an old tree, the linden 
of all the songs and 
novels. Here boys 
and girls sit in the 
evening, covered by 
the foliage. This tree 
smooth, hard, insipid. In the background is 
a platform in masonry just as hard, just as 
insipid, just as colorless. Two more ex¬ 
amples tell the same tale—a change of level 
in the garden requires a flight of steps. In 
the one instance these have been cut from 
stone and divided in many reaches. They 
ascend between walls 
or are partly bordered 
by a simple wooden 
railing. Every few 
steps there is an op¬ 
portunity to rest and 
to cast a glance on 
all the beauty around. 
If one sits beside the 
house, above one can 
watch the turnings of 
the stair and the host 
sees his visitors come 
into view and for an 
instant disappear. 
And side by side with 
this is an altogether 
A GATE WHERE MODERN IRONWORK 
HAS FAILED 
