A tourist riding a few miles in almost any New England city, would hardly fail to notice that a large number of the rural residences display a profusion of architectural embellishment, without wearing a cheerful, home-like look. He would pass cottage after cottage ornamented with slender porticoes, fanciful verandas, sculptured gables and deep bay windows, but situated in a pen-like looking enclosure, and surrounded with fixtures, dark and dismal; and with arbor vitæ hedges whose yellow cast clearly indicated that they had been planted in ungenial soil. In each narrow yard he would notice flower beds, containing many unhealthy looking plants, and most of these beds would exhibit the same arrangement and the same multifarious specimens of the odds and ends of Nature for miles. He would remark concerning these suburban seats that they were _pretty_; he would hardly say beautiful, certainly not charming. They were not satisfying to the eye—they were designed to impart an expression of exquisite rurality but failed. As the same tourist passed by some old-fashioned farm house, with its broad green lawns in front, shaded with green old elms; as he noticed the wood colored porch covered with luxuriant woodbine, the dove-cote with its glittering birds, the dark orchards beyond the yard, the pond in the meadow overhung with willows; or, as he descried some inexpensive cottage, removed from the road and half hidden from view by graceful arbors and vigorous native trees, he would ride slowly and express his satisfaction at each of these scenes of rural taste and beauty. It is not the richness of art that gives to English cottages their picturesqueness and poetic expression, but the beauty of the grounds that surround them, and the vines that adorn them. It is not the fantastic gables, nor the latticed windows that so captivate the eye of the traveller, but the tasteful foliage that drapes them, and the lustrous vines that embower them. Denude these cottages of these embellishments, and many of them would appear as uninviting to the eye as the mouldering tower without the classic ivy. Louis XIV had his Versailles, and his elegant queen her embowered Triannon; but the simple charms of Triannon proved more inviting to the cultivated minds of the court, than the gorgeous pile and artificial gardens at Versailles. We devote too much time to the cultivation of exotics, and too lightly value the vines and shrubs of our native soil. Again, we sacrifice rich foliage that lasts for a season, to gaudy flowers that last only for a brief period. The double prairie rose is a very delightful sight—for a single week—and during the remaining season it is a miserable brier, commonly wormy and lousy. Yet the prairie rose is in common use as an ornament for the veranda, while the jessamine, the woodbine, the wisteria and the luxuriant honeysuckle are, put in less conspicuous places, or their cultivation wholly neglected.