cities, where
lots are sold by the inch, small space is to spare for a chimney
constructed on magnanimous principles; and, as with most thin men, who
are generally tall, so with such houses, what is lacking in breadth,
must be made up in height. This remark holds true even with regard to
many very stylish abodes, built by the most stylish of gentlemen. And
yet, when that stylish gentleman, Louis le Grand of France, would build
a palace for his lady, friend, Madame de Maintenon, he built it but
one story high--in fact in the cottage style. But then, how uncommonly
quadrangular, spacious, and broad--horizontal acres, not vertical
ones. Such is the palace, which, in all its one-storied magnificence
of Languedoc marble, in the garden of Versailles, still remains to this
day. Any man can buy a square foot of land and plant a liberty-pole on
it; but it takes a king to set apart whole acres for a grand triannon.

But nowadays it is different; and furthermore, what originated in a
necessity has been mounted into a vaunt. In towns there is large rivalry
in building tall houses. If one gentleman builds his house four stories
high, and another gentleman comes next door and builds five stories
high, then the former, not to be looked down upon that way, immediately
sends for his architect and claps a fifth and a sixth story on top
of his previous four. And, not till the gentleman has achieved his
aspiration, not till he has stolen over the way by twilight and observed
how his sixth story soars beyond his neighbor's fifth--not till then
does he retire to his rest with satisfaction.

Such folks, it seems to me, need mountains for neighbors, to take this
emulous conceit of soaring out of them.

If, considering that mine is a very wide house, and by no means lofty,
aught in the above may appear like interested pleading, as if I did but
fold myself about in the cloak of a general proposition, cunningly to
tickle my individual vanity beneath it, such misconception must vanish
upon my frankly conceding, that land adjoining my alder swamp was sold
last month for ten dollars an acre, and thought a rash purchase at that;
so that for wide houses hereabouts there is plenty of room, and cheap.
Indeed so cheap--dirt cheap--is the soil, that our elms thrust out their
roots in it, and hang their great boughs over it, in the most lavish and
reckless way. Almost all our crops, too, are sown broadcast, even peas
and turnips. A farmer among us, who s