Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/378

374  The cottage homes of England! By thousands on her plains, They are smiling o'er the silv'ry brooks, And round the hamlet fanes. Through glowing orchards forth they peep, Each from its nook of leaves, And fearless there the lowly sleep As the bird beneath their eaves.

They recall that verse, but with a difference, for while Mrs. Heman's cottage homes gave delight to the eye by their rugged and peaceful external beauty, they must have brought anxiety to the soul of the sanitarian who peeped into them by their primitive squalidity. The cottage homes of Letchworth are not less gratifying in their sanitary than in their esthetical aspects, and may be slept in by their lowly inhabitants with a sense of security that the cottagers of a century ago, when typhus and smallpox patrolled the land, where scarcely entitled to feel. These cottages have dealt the death blow to foolish restrictions on country housing. That village leads the way in a new movement to which all sound sanitarians will cordially wish success.

A survey of some of these cottages at Letchworth, so quaintly pretty, so minutely commodious, so hygienically correct, so reasonable in price, suggests that they should have attractions for the well-to-do, not less than for the laboring class. Perched on some beetling cliff or breezy down, bosomed in some bosky dell, or planted in the fields neighboring some quiet hamlet, they would form a delightful week-end or holiday resort for families of moderate means. For children living in London, or other populous city, the seaside town, with the vulgar riot of the sands, is not the place in which their vacations can be most healthfully or profitably spent. They should be brought into living contact with nature, be enabled to form friendships with trees and animals, to pry into the secrets of insects and birds, and taught to take more pleasure in the hedge rows with their 'profuse wealth of unmarketable beauty,' than in the shop windows with their flaunting temptations. The cheap cottage as a holiday-home would create new family affinities, promote the unfolding of faculties that are apt to remain dormant or stunted amongst bricks and mortar, and teach self-help and independence instead of the feeble snobbery that meets every want as it arises by ringing the bell, for I saw no bells, electric or other, in these cottages. It would obviate the apprehensions of infection that are often not unjustifiably felt in taking possession of lodgings or furnished houses at seaside resorts, and elicit taste and ingenuity as no mere hired and temporary residence can do. Its decorative improvement would be a recreation, and the owner would be proud to say of it—'a cheap thing, but mine own.' It is thought sometimes that