OCR Text |
Show OLD HOUSES. <br><br> A house now-a-days is called old at forty years. At any rate, it is not new. There are houses much older than the above age, however, sprinkled all over the hills and valleys of New England. Some of them have not had a coat of paint in perhaps fifteen or twenty years, while others have never been troubled with paint at all. In this age of confusion and construction, it sometimes rises as a question in the minds of their owners and occupiers whether such houses are worth trying to rescue at all. They insensibly catch the feverish discontent of the time, and say to themselves that it would be better, if anything is to be done, to pull down the old houses and supplant them with new ones. An easy matter to resolve upon and to execute, but not so easy to undo if it should chance to prove unsatisfactory. <br><br> We enjoin the preservation of all the old homes in the country till the latest day possible. The poet tells us with truth that not with money can we buy the old associations. The walls of the familiar rooms are hung with tender and pleasant thoughts, as with rich-wrought tapestries. The roofs are coated with the brown colors and gray mosaics of past days. Out of the old chimneys have ascended white and blue smokes since childhood began, like fresh incense from the altar around which the family circle was gathered every day. And if saddest memories mix with the pleasanter ones, as they always will, even they are woven into the tissues of our experience to tone down and give a deeper expression to the whole pattern, and we would not, on reflection, have a single one of them cut out, for our lives. So much, and vastly more, clothes and surrounds and acts off the plain reality of an old and apparently gone-by home. <br><br> Now it becomes a very grave issue whether it is not better everyway for us to prolong the visible existence of our old houses to the farthest possible limit, handing them down along the generations for whom they become living lessons for the past, than to root them up as if they were in a sense pestilential, and make eager haste to obliterate the very memory of their long and serviceable existence. There is more than money in such an issue as this. It is a question that touches all the finer sensibilities of our existence. We do not scruple to affirm that aside from the matter of association merely, an old house in a state of careful and loving preservation is something for its owner to take a genuine pride in. It carries in its aspect and profile the marks of seasoned character, which is the fruit of time alone. It signifies to the beholder that more than mere carpeting was requisite to produce this result, and that taste and study and tender thought, and a thousand upspringing impulses of sentiment, combined to make it the dear, desirable domicile it is. <br><br> Without an excess of expenditure almost any old house, that is not already a ruin, may be restored to a soft expression of venerableness and made to wear an unmistakable, inalienable look of repose and home. That is the real appearance which all country dwellings ought to strive, through their occupants, to attain. Miracles can be wrought upon them at an astonishingly small cost. Loving hands can do vastly more than those of the paid hireling. The owner of a country home, if he knew it, has that which the dwellers in palatial city mansions continually envy him. He has earth, air, sunlight, and skies all free. There is no prescribed limit to his enjoyment of them. The breath of the growing vegetation, earthy scents, the music of the wind in the tree-tops, grass and flowers, the light of sun, moon and stars, all combine to furnish and beautify and exalt his home. <br><br> Age, instead of being a drawback to a home thus situated, only gives it greater harmony with all things surrounding. An old house appears to be a part of the landscape itself, looking as if it sprung from the earth on which it stands. The very trees which shade its roof seem to belong to and to be a part of it. Who does not regard with deeper and tenderer feelings the doorstep over which so many feet have gladly stepped, with the welcomes of joy, the messages of pleasure, and the burdens of grief become worn into its stony texture? And it is but a touch of a tasteful hand that is sufficient to preserve all such old doorsteps and their speechless associations. A slight alteration of an old gable, the pulling down or pushing back a roof line, an extending of a porch, a bit of latticework erected here or there, some choice shrubbery, the laying out of a sinuous? path and bordering it with early and late flowers-a few little things like these will marvelously alter the looks of an old house outwardly, and compel its occupant to continue his loving work till the whole is rejuvenated. <br><br> It is not glaring colors in paint or smart and pretentious additions which these old houses need, so much as the gentle but firm and intelligent application of the hand of taste. If every one who had an old house to restore would simply follow his own heart's desire in such matters, he would make it a picturesquely inviting object in spite of himself. For it is not the heart that ever goes astray here, but the fancy led on by vanity and the giddy slave of imitation. The single expression which it is desirable to attain is that of repose. Home means tranquility, security, retreat, rest. Anybody who can appreciate these is competent to give adequate and attractive expression to them. We need none of us fear for results, if we will but make a beginning.-[Mess. Ploughman. |