visible joints or corner finish. Such a covering is costly, defective,
and contrary to first principles. Clapboards are good. Hardly anything
is better, but don't feel restricted to one mode. I send you some
sketches suggesting what may be done in this department by a careful
design in the use of wide boards and narrow boards, clapboards and
battens; boards horizontal, vertical, and cornerwise,--any and all are
legitimate, and it may be well to use them all on one building.

[Illustration: OUTER FINISH OF WOOD.]

Many points relating to the use of wood and appertaining equally to
buildings whose walls are of brick or stone, we may find farther on.
In closing, let me adjure you by all your hope of a comfortable, safe,
and satisfying house,--by all the common-sense in your possession and
all the capital at your command,--resolve that you will never--no,
never--build your house of unseasoned timber.

LETTER XX.

From John.

A SURRENDER AND CHANGE OF BASE.

MY DEAR ARCHITECT: It was very well for Noah and the other
antediluvians, who had any little building to do, to wait for their
timber to season. When a man has a thousand years or so to live, he
can afford to take things easy. It's different in this great and
glorious nineteenth century, when the chief aim is to make the
shortest time on record. You know our Western farmers have a brisk way
of going out into their thousand-acre wheatfields before breakfast,
reaping, threshing, and grinding the grain, which their thrifty wives
make into biscuit for the morning meal; and you've heard of the young
man who caught a sheep in the morning, sheared it, carded, spun, and
wove the wool, cut the cloth and made the coat to wear at his own
wedding in the evening. Young America don't understand why a pine or
an oak tree can't be put over the course, like a sheep or an acre of
grain. Besides, you talk like an old fogy. When a man says he has
decided to build a house, he means he is ready to begin,--right off;
and if our lumber-dealers won't keep dry stuff (which of course they
won't unless obliged to), then he must use green.

I'm surprised you don't admire the fanciful brackets and other wooden
straddle-bugs people are so fond of decorating their houses with. By
the way, if these brackets are purely ornamental, there ought not to
be two alike, any more than you'd have two busts or two pictures alike
in one room. Suppose you collect an assortment of the rich and rares