Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/670

 and unpainted. Rarely does a house strike one as being specially marked or better looking than its neighbors; more substantial, certainly, some of them are, and yet there is a sameness about them which becomes wearisome. Particularly is this the case with the long, uninteresting row of houses that border a village street; their picturesque



roofs alone save them from becoming monotonous. A closer study, however, reveals some marked differences between the country and city houses, as well as between those of different provinces.

The country house, if anything more than a shelter from the elements, is larger and more substantial than the city house, and, with its ponderous thatched roof and elaborate ridge, is always picturesque. One sees much larger houses in the north—roofs of grand proportions and an amplitude of space beneath, that farther south occurs only under the roofs of temples. We speak now of the houses of the better classes, for the poor farm-laborer and fisherman, as well as their prototypes in the city, possess houses that are little better than shanties, built, as a friend has forcibly expressed it, of "chips, paper, and straw." But even these huts, clustered together as they oftentimes are in the