House <y Garden 
A PERSIAN gentleman’s COUNTRY SEAT 
it is unusual, indeed, for the builder even to 
have maintained a uniform height of “ riser ” 
for the steps. The bottom one is not infre¬ 
quently twenty inches high, and the others 
vary, down to a foot, but the shallow steps are 
usually at the top, indicating a wise recogni¬ 
tion, on the part of the architect, of the 
exhaustible quality of human energy. But 
the Persian of old, in his voluminous robes, 
must have been more or less of an athlete to 
master the difficulty of these lower steps, 
which to an American in trousers are fraught 
with danger that it is unpleasant to contem¬ 
plate. 
Fortunately, however, there is, as a rule, 
little need for stair climbing. It would seem 
likely that the frequency of earthquakes is 
responsible for the scarcity of tall buildings. 
No quarter of the world, unless it be the 
Italian peninsula, has suffered more from 
seismic disturbance than has this part of Asia, 
and almost every city has a record of one or 
more partial destructions in the course of 
each century. Yet the survivors rebuild on 
the same sites, with fatalistic realization, evi¬ 
dently that one place is as likely as another, 
and that it is useless to try to dodge one’s 
kismet. And they have learned to build low. 
If the outside of a modern Persian 
house is a jumble of Eastern and Western 
characteristics, much more is the tendency 
perceptible in the interiors. The chief point 
of yielding has been noted, — the chairs. It 
strikes an American as ridiculous to see a 
room richly carpeted after the manner of the 
East, and provided with the old-fashioned 
mattresses all about the walls, but with the 
cheap and altogether ungainly bent-wood 
chairs set about here and there, and, likely as 
not, heavy Russian center-tables of an inferior 
sort, laden with sundry Western ornaments, 
always inclusive of one or more European 
lamps. These have been introduced by the 
Russian traders, and are to be found every- 
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