the better. Roofs
will leak, and cured hay will keep sweet in a mow of any depth and
size in our dry atmosphere.

The Dutch barn was the most picturesque barn that has been built,
especially when thatched with straw, as they nearly all were, and
forming one side of an inclosure of lower roofs or sheds also
covered with straw, beneath which the cattle took refuge from the
winter storms. Its immense, unpainted gable, cut with holes for the
swallows, was like a section of a respectable-sized hill, and its
roof like its slope. Its great doors always had a hood projecting
over them, and the doors themselves were divided horizontally into
upper and lower halves; the upper halves very frequently being left
open, through which you caught a glimpse of the mows of hay, or the
twinkle of flails when the grain was being threshed.

The old Dutch farmhouses, too, were always pleasing to look upon.
They were low, often made of stone, with deep window-jambs and great
family fireplaces. The outside door, like that of the barn, was
always divided into upper and lower halves. When the weather
permitted, the upper half could stand open, giving light and air
without the cold draught over the floor where the children were
playing that our wide-swung doors admit. This feature of the Dutch
house and barn certainly merits preservation in our modern
buildings.

The large, unpainted timber barns that succeeded the first Yankee
settlers' log stables were also picturesque, especially when a
lean-to for the cow-stable was added, and the roof carried down with
a long sweep over it; or when the barn was flanked by an open shed
with a hayloft above it, where the hens cackled and hid their
nests, and from the open window of which the hay was always hanging.

Then the great timbers of these barns and the Dutch barn, hewn from
maple or birch or oak trees from the primitive woods, and put in
place by the combined strength of all the brawny arms in the
neighborhood when the barn was raised,--timbers strong enough and
heavy enough for docks and quays, and that have absorbed the odors
of the hay and grain until they look ripe and mellow and full of the
pleasing sentiment of the great, sturdy, bountiful interior! The
"big beam" has become smooth and polished from the hay that has been
pitched over it, and the sweaty, sturdy forms that have crossed it.
One feels that he would like a piece of furniture--a chair, or a
table, or a writing-desk, a bedstead,