The house, we have said, is plain and large. Its size and finish bespeak gentlemanly but unpretending ease and fortune. It has no air of assumed lordliness or upstart pretension. No foreign models seem to have been consulted in its design, no proportions of art studied; yet it wants not symmetry as well-planned convenience, comfort, and fitness lend, as if without intention. A tall, and rather handsome columned portico, in front, is the only thing decorative about it; but is not enough so to be at all out of keeping. It is of the whole height of the central building, of two stories, and covers about half its length of some forty-five feet. Broad steps, five in number, support and give access along its entire front. Its depth is about one-third its width. The main building itself is a parallelogram, near half as deep as it is long. At each flank, a little receding, is a single-storied wing of about twenty feet, its flat roof surmounted by a balustrade. The house stands on a gently-rising eminence. A wide lawn, broken only here and there by clumps of trees, stretches before it. On either side are irregular masses of these, of different shapes and foliage, evergreen and deciduous, which thicken at places into a grove, and half screen those dependencies of a handsome establishment--stables, dairies and the like--which, left openly in sight, look very ill, and can be made to look no otherwise, even by the trying to make them look genteel: for they are disagreeable objects, that call up (attire them as you will) ideas not dainty. As, therefore, the eye should not miss them altogether--for their absence would imply great discomfort and inconvenience--the best way is to half-veil them, as is done at Montpelier.