, and the ceilings hang low. I don't wonder you object to
a brick house in the country. Yet, if you propose to build a model,
honest and permanent, a house that shall be worth what it costs and
look as good as it is, I shall still recommend brick. The growing
scarcity of wood, the usual costliness of stone, the abundance of
clay, the rapidity with which brick can be made and used,--one season
being sufficient to develop the most awkward hod-carrier into a
four-dollars-a-day journeyman bricklayer,--the demand for more
permanence in our domestic dwellings, and the known worth of brick in
point of durability and safety,--all these reasons will, I think,
cause a steady increase in their use. Hence it behooves us to study
the matter carefully, and see whether any good thing can be done with
them.

Since the time, long ago, when the aspiring sons of Noah said to one
another, "Go to; let us make brick and burn them thoroughly," to the
latest kiln in Hampden brick-yard, there seems to have been little
variety in the making or using of them, except that among different
nations they have assumed different forms. They are found as huge
blocks a foot and a half square, and in little flinty cakes no bigger
than a snuff-box. The Romans made the best ones, some of their
buildings having defied the elements for seventeen centuries, and
their mantle, as to brickmaking, has fallen upon the Dutch. They were
found among the ancient Peruvians, and the Chinese made beautiful the
outside of the temple by giving a porcelain finish to the brick. Still
I fancy they have always been more famous for their use than for their
beauty; but their utility is beyond all question. If our modern
experience doesn't prove it, read this inscription from an ancient
brick pyramid of Howara:--

"Do not undervalue me by comparing me with pyramids of stone; for I am
better than they as Jove exceeds the other deities. I am made of
bricks from clay, brought up from the bottom of the lake adhering to
poles."

Notwithstanding these claims to veneration, there is but little poetry
about them, and therefore, I suppose, but little progress. Compared
with other materials, they have undergone slight changes with us, in
color, shape, or modes of use. A block of wood or stone contains, in
the eye of the artistic workman, every possible grace of form and
moulding; but a brick is a square, red, uninteresting fact, and the
laying of them the most prosaic of all work. By com