visitor from England is the manner in which the village is laid out
and built. Neither in England nor anywhere else in western Europe have I
ever met with a village of the New England type. In English villages one
finds small houses closely crowded together, sometimes in blocks of ten
or a dozen, and inhabited by people belonging to the lower orders of
society; while the fine houses of gentlemen stand quite apart in the
country, perhaps out of sight of one another, and surrounded by very
extensive grounds. The origin of the village, in a mere aggregation of
tenants of the lord of the manor, is thus vividly suggested. In France
one is still more impressed, I think, with this closely packed structure
of the village. In the New England village, on the other hand, the finer
and the poorer houses stand side by side along the road. There are wide
straight streets overarched with spreading elms and maples, and on
either side stand the houses, with little green lawns in front, called
in rustic parlance "door-yards." The finer houses may stand a thousand
feet apart from their neighbours on either side, while between the
poorer ones there may be intervals of from twenty to one hundred feet,
but they are never found crowded together in blocks. Built in this
capacious fashion, a village of a thousand inhabitants may have a main
street more than a mile in length, with half a dozen crossing streets
losing themselves gradually in long stretches of country road. The
finest houses are not ducal palaces, but may be compared with the
ordinary country-houses of gentlemen in England. The poorest houses are
never hovels, such as one sees in the Scotch Highlands. The picturesque
and cosy cottage at Shottery, where Shakespeare used to do his courting,
will serve very well as a sample of the humblest sort of old-fashioned
New England farm-house. But most of the dwellings in the village come
between these extremes. They are plain neat wooden houses, in
capaciousness more like villas than cottages. A New England village
street, laid out in this way, is usually very picturesque and beautiful,
and it is highly characteristic. In comparing it with things in Europe,
where one rarely finds anything at all like it, one must go to something
very different from a village. As you stand in the Court of Heroes at
Versailles and look down the broad and noble avenue that leads to
Paris, the effect of the vista is much like that of a New England
village street.