Page:The Poetry of Architecture.djvu/44

32 walls are very precisely and prettily plastered; and it is rendered quite complete by the addition of two neat little bow-windows, supported on neat little mahogany brackets, full of neat little squares of red and yellow glass. Its door is approached under a neat little veranda, "uncommon green," and is flanked on each side by a neat little round table, with all its legs of different lengths, and by a variety of neat little wooden chairs, all very peculiarly uncomfortable, and amazingly full of earwigs: the whole being surrounded by a garden full of flints, burnt bricks, and cinders, with some water in the middle, and a fountain in the middle of it, which won't play; accompanied by some goldfish, which won't swim; and by two or three ducks, which will splash. Now, I am excessively sorry to inform the members of any respectable English family, who are making themselves uncomfortable in one of these ingenious conceptions, under the idea that they are living in a Swiss cottage, that they labour under a melancholy deception; and shall now proceed to investigate the peculiarities of the real building.

The life of a Swiss peasant is divided into two periods; that in which he is watching his cattle at their summer pasture on the high Alps, and that in which he seeks shelter from the violence of the winter storms in the most retired parts of the low valleys. During the first period,