y that a man should be able to drive his team around his house on his
own land. In our day it is highly desirable that a house should be built
so as to leave as much land under control between the buildings and the
lot line as possible. This, of course, does not apply to houses built on
a farm of a hundred acres or more, but rather to the house in a small
village where a few hundred people live closely together, under rural
conditions. In such a village the water-supply usually comes from wells,
and the wastes of the household are discharged into privies and
cesspools. There is no law, unfortunately, which restricts the location
of either of these two essential structures, and it is quite possible
for a well, built within a few feet of a property line, to be ruined in
quality by a cesspool, built later, on the other side of the line. It
seems very unjust that, after the trouble and expense of building a
well, a neighbor may render it worthless by the location of his
cesspool, and yet, unless one can prove a direct underground connection
between well and cesspool, no law is applicable to prevent the
construction of the latter.

Besides such a menace to health, there are other objections to the
immediate vicinity of neighbors which can be avoided by a judicious
interposition of space. For example, the writer listened through a long
evening, recently, to a hearing before a City Commissioner of Health,
where one householder and a crowd of witnesses complained of the noise
made by a kicking horse in an adjacent stable. The one witness who was
not disturbed by the noise, and who lived in the vicinity, was
unexpectedly found to be deaf.

It is wisdom also to have a reasonable space between a house and the
highway, chiefly because the dust of the road is thereby kept from the
house. There are people who find much enjoyment in watching passers-by
on the road, and with them front windows would be as close to the road
as possible, but it is wiser to have a front yard of at least fifty feet
depth when possible.

Finally, the location on a sidehill, even when otherwise advantageous,
is to be regarded with suspicion if the subsoil strata are horizontal
and neighbors up the slope have cesspools in use. The writer knows of
several cesspools, built in rock, which, so far as their owners were
concerned, have worked successfully for many years, but the water
leeching away through the rock was finally discovered to be the cause of
conti