impressed the writer fully as much as the exterior. It seemed to me that the same influence came back again that rushed over my senses when first I beheld the worn steps to the royal tombs at Westminster. It was so very old and replete with atmosphere! It had so much history to tell that one’s most natural inclination was to sit down quickly upon the roughly hewn doorsteps bedabbled by streaks of sunlight filtering through the foliage, and just listen. Ah, how ridiculous it would be to imagine that the wonderfully satisfying lines of the roof, the delicious overhang of the gable, the relationship of the stone chimney and the proportions generally were evolved by Miles Merwin himself, out of a printed book upon the æsthetics of design! For neither Miles Merwin nor his master-builder may be said to have originated the house they erected. I do not fancy, for one moment, that they ever contemplated such an ill-advised departure from precedent. They had been taught how to construct three or four different kinds of roofs, and they simply selected the one most suitable to the needs of this case. It was the influence and teaching of more than one great architect that designed the ancient farm-house at Durham. And now you need no longer conjecture why Colonial architecture is so good and remains in fashion. You know. Select, if you please, the detail of the hooded entrance. A modern house-builder requested to supply some unique shelter for the doorway would understand you to mean that you wished him to invent something which, by the way, is a task infinitely agreeable to the modern practitioner. It is safe to aver that the adviser of Miles Merwin, whoever he was, had never invented anything in his life. He would not have dared to try the experiment in architecture, at any rate, more than had he been the indentured apprentice of a Florentine architect. Although I can, very easily, imagine him quoting his grandsire that this particular kind of hood he was recommending to his principal, with its deep cornice, was an exceptionally rigid and durable one. The truth of which observation time has sufficiently demonstrated. It was “Old Hickory” who issued the emancipation proclamation to young America absolving him from the time-honored and universal fealty to Art. But young America was deceived; it was a PLATE XVII. [Illustration: PERISTYLE TO A HOUSE IN WYOMING, N. J., 1897.] [Illustration: AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, 1899.] campaign lie. Young America was not emancipated at all. Another master was set over him, and that master was unrelenting expediency, who forthwith usurped the throne of deposed art. Perhaps we are just beginning to suspect the ruse after seventy-five years of license and anarchy in art matters. What we did was simply to exchange a legitimate sovereign for a coarse, unlettered and brutal demagogue, of whom every American, young and old, by this time, should be heartily ashamed.