Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/50

 perhaps very regular, they are not placed, as in a good many modem houses, just like a postage stamp on a letter, but there is a certain fittingness about them; there is very often either about the shape of the window, or about the casement, or the way of disposing of the glass and the lead or wood, something to attract and to please the fancy. In the porch or door one is glad always to notice in the older houses not alone the solid, honest way in which the door and its framework have been put up, but the fact that the timber itself has been thoroughly well chosen and well seasoned, which is not true of most of the modem houses; and that, instead of having handles and knockers chosen out of those made by the gross at Bilston or Wolverhampton, they have generally finely wrought handles made deftly and honestly by the village blacksmith, which stand, not the racket of a few years, but work as easily and as smoothly to-day as they did when Elizabeth was Queen or Charles I. was King. When you go inside some of these old houses, is there not a certain character about