One reason, among many, why the old-time houses are more
grateful to the eye than those of similar cost but modern style, is
that they were built of wood honestly and legitimately used, when wood
was on all accounts the most suitable material for building. It is so
still, and will be for a long time in many places, for its economy and
convenience. Given a fair chance, it may be made very durable, and is
even rendered practically fire-proof without great cost, by kyanizing
and various other methods that are adopted for the same purpose. You
will find one mode described in the June number of Harper's Magazine
for 1870. Wood is effective, too, in appearance, when rightly used,
which, more's the pity, does not often happen; for of all the
materials that minister to human comfort and needs, this seems to me
the most abused. Iron, like the old-time saints, betrays not its solid
worth till it has been tried by fire,--is all the better for being
hammered and beaten; stone is as much improved as an unruly boy by a
good dressing; while bricks, like ghosts, come forth from their
purgatory for the express purpose of being laid. All of these, by
appropriate treatment, are invested with graces and glories that by
nature they never owned. But a tree, graceful, noble, and grand beyond
all human imitation, is ignominiously hewn down, every natural beauty
disguised or annihilated, and its helpless form compelled to assume
most uncouth shapes and grimmest colors.

[Illustration: THE GROVES WERE GOD'S FIRST TEMPLES.]

Of late our injustice is greater and more disastrous; for we are
destroying the very sources of supply without providing for the
future, using wood in large quantities where other materials would be
better and cheaper. Yet we think ourselves very economical. Once it
was common to enclose wood buildings of all grades by walls at least
ten or twelve inches thick, sometimes much more, and solid at that.
They were called log-houses. Now it is the fashion to use two by four
inch studs standing in rows at such distances that the whole substance
of the frame in a single sheet would be about half an inch thick.
These are suggestively called balloon frames. The former would be huge
and inconvenient, the latter are often fair and frail. That the frame
of the outer wall of a wooden building should be mainly vertical is
evident, the outer studs, if possible, extending from the sill to the
plates, and as many of the inner ones as may be