There is an affectation of _cottage_ building, with some people who, with a seeming humility, really aim at higher flights of style in living within them, than truth of either design or purpose will admit. But as such cases are more among villagers, and those temporarily retiring from the city for summer residence, the farm cottage has little to do with it. Still, such fancies are contagious, and we have occasionally seen the ambitious cottage, with its covert expression of humility, insinuating itself on to the farm, and for the farmer's own family occupation, too, which at once spoiled, to the eye, the _substantial reality_ of the whole establishment. A farmer should discard all such things as _ornamental_ cottages. They do not belong to the farm. If he live in a cottage himself, it should be a _plain_ one; yet it may be very substantial and well finished--something showing that he means either to be content in it, in its character of plainness, or that he intends, at a future day, to build something better--when this may serve for the habitation of one of his laborers. The cottage should never occupy a principal, or prominent site on the farm. It should take a subordinate position of ground. This adds to its expression as subordinate in rank, among the lesser farm buildings. A cottage cannot, and should not aspire to be _chief_ in either position or character. Such should be the farm house proper; although unpretending, still, in style, above the cottage; and if the latter, in addition, be required on the farm, it should so appear, both in construction and finish; just what it is intended for--a tenement for economical purposes. There is another kind of cottage, the dwellers in which, these pages will probably never reach, that expresses, in its wild structure, and rude locality, the idea of Moore's pretty song-- "I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled Above the green elms, that a cottage was near." Yet, in some parts of our country, landlords may build such, for the accommodation of tenants, which they may make useful on the outskirts of their estates, and add indirectly to their own convenience and interest in so doing. This may be indulged in, _poetically_ too--for almost any thinking man has a spice of poetry in his composition--vagabondism, a strict, economizing utilitarian would call it. The name matters not. One may as well indulge his taste in this cheap sort of charitable expenditure, as another may indulge, in his dogs, and guns, his horses and equipages--and the first is far the cheapest. They, at the west and south, understand this, whose recreations are occasionally with their hounds, in chase of the deer, and the fox, and in their pursuit spend weeks of the fall and winter months, in which they are accompanied, and assisted, as boon companions for the time, by the rude tenants of the cottages we have described: "A cheerful, simple, honest people."