Yours,
John.

LETTER XI.

From the Architect.

The strength and durability of brick.

My dear John:  It is encouraging to know that my suggestions find some favor in your sight.  Pray don’t go too fast.  It isn’t well to make up our minds fully until we have heard all sides, lest we have them to unmake, which is always more or less painful.

Notwithstanding the peculiar merits of the stone walls, the coming house,—­the house that is to embody all the comforts and amenities of civilized life,—­the house of safe and economic construction, well warmed, well ventilated, defiant alike of flood, frosty and fire,—­the millennial house, if you please, will doubtless be a brick one.  Don’t be alarmed.  I know just what vision rises before your mind’s eye as you read this.  A huge square edifice; windows very high from the ground, not very large, square tops, frame and sash painted white; expressionless roof; flat, helpless chimneys perched upon the outer walls, the course of their flues showing in a crooked stain; at the back side a most humiliated-looking wooden attachment, somewhat unhinged as to its doors and out at the elbows as to its windows, evidently hiding behind the pile of brick and mortar that tries to look dignified and grand, but only succeeds in making a great red blot on the landscape; all the while you know the only homelike portion of the establishment is in the wooden rear part.  The front rooms are dark and gloomy, the paper hangings are mouldy, the closets musty and damp; there is a combined smell of creosote and whitewash pervading the chambers, and the ceilings hang low.  I don’t wonder you object to a brick house in the country.  Yet, if you propose to build a model, honest and permanent, a house that shall be worth what it costs and look as good as it is, I shall still recommend brick.  The growing scarcity of wood, the usual costliness of stone, the abundance of clay, the rapidity with which brick can be made and used,—­one season being sufficient to develop the most awkward hod-carrier into a four-dollars-a-day journeyman bricklayer,—­the demand for more permanence in our domestic dwellings, and the known worth of brick in point of durability and safety,—­all these reasons will, I think, cause a steady increase in their use.  Hence it behooves us to study the matter carefully, and see whether any good thing can be done with them.

Since the time, long ago, when the aspiring sons of Noah said to one another, “Go to; let us make brick and burn them thoroughly,” to the latest kiln in Hampden brick-yard, there seems to have been little variety in the making or using of them, except that among different nations they have assumed different forms.  They are found as huge blocks a foot and a half square, and in little flinty cakes no bigger than a snuff-box.  The Romans made the best ones,