The ancient haunts of men have numberless tongues for those who know how to hear them speak. It was not until some fifteen years of Mrs. Allingham's career as a painter in water-colour had been accomplished that she found the subject with which her name has since been so inseparably linked. Looking through the ranks of her associates in the Art it is in rare instances that we encounter so complete a departure out of a long-practised groove, or one which has been so amply justified. But in selecting English Cottages and Homesteads, and peopling them with a comely tenantry, she happened upon a theme that was certain not only to obtain the suffrages of the ordinary exhibition visitors, but of those who add to seeing, admiration and acquisition. Thus it has come to pass that in the other fifteen years which have elapsed since she first began to paint them, "Mrs. Allingham's Cottages" have become a household word amongst connoisseurs of English water-colours, and no representative collection has been deemed to be complete without an example of them. This appreciation is very assuredly a sound one, as the value of these pictures does not consist solely in their beauty as works of Art, but in their recording in line and colour a most interesting but unfortunately vanishing phase of English domestic architecture. For the cottages are almost without exception veritable portraits, the artist (whilst naturally selecting those best suited to her purpose) having felt it a duty to present them with an accuracy of structural feature which is not always the case in creations of this kind, where the painter has had other views, and considered that he could improve his picture by an addition here and an omission there. So many of Mrs. Allingham's drawings of cottages have been taken from the counties of Surrey and Sussex, that it may interest not only the owners of those here reproduced, but others who possess similar subjects, to read a short description of the features that distinguish the buildings in these districts. One is perhaps too apt to pass these lowlier habitations of our fellow-men, whether we see them in reality or in their counterfeits, without a thought as to their structure, or an idea that it is an evolution which has grown on very marked lines from primitive types, and which in almost every instance has been influenced by local surroundings.