But the children had to hurry off to school, and it was a pity to call them early:  they had lessons to learn in the afternoon.  To them the garden was work, not play as it should have been; so they failed to gain that contact with mother earth which gives inspiration as well as health; they failed to acquire a love of nature, became infected with the germ of gregariousness, preferred the glare of lights, the rush of hurrying crowds, and lost the relish for fresh air and quiet.  This second generation came to the city boarding-house and flat as soon as they were free, leaving their parents’ houses to go the same way as the grandfather’s farmhouse, into the hands of the foreigner not yet Americanized to high standards of cleanliness and orderliness.

These houses, too, are settling down into unkempt grounds with dilapidated porches and blinds.  Such eyesores as one finds on the trolley-lines in any direction!  They may have town-water supply, or they may depend on wells, but they are frequently without sewer-connection.

It is costly to be neat and clean, and only those whose minds require such surroundings in order to be comfortable will pay the cost in time, trouble, and money.

(3) Some families made a compromise and built what is called a modern house with bath-room and furnace (after the air-tight-stove craze passed), with jigsaw ornamentation outside and in, pretentious-looking dwellings with no proper kitchen accompaniments, and an unsavory garbage-barrel in the small back yard, under the next neighbor’s windows.  These houses are so close together that sounds and smells mingle; there is so little land that there is no satisfaction in caring for it.  Houses of this sort are altogether too frequently found, occupying good locations and jarring on the nerves of the better-trained young people of to-day.  What is to be done with them?  They are too expensive to pull down, and hence are the last resort of those who find they must retrench.  They are mere temporary shelters, not loved homes.

The plumbing is usually of a cheap order, and the drains are not infrequently broken, so that sanitarily these dwellings are often more suspicious than the abandoned farmhouse.

(4) The influx from village and country made demand for city housing of an inexpensive sort, and there came into being all over the land the type of the family house squeezed by the price of land to four stories high, 16 to 20 feet wide, built in long rows and blocks.  The “ugly sixties” bred not only distressful village “villas,” but unpleasant city houses of this type, which are to-day a real menace to wholesome living.  Many such blocks may be found in any of our older cities, casting a depressing influence upon all who come in sight of them, and deteriorating the manners and morals of all who live in them.  For these have gone the way of the other classes mentioned and become perverted from the uses they were designed for.  In the