[13] Highways and Byways in Sussex, by E.V.  Lucas.

The builders and masons of our country cottages were cunning men, and adapted their designs to their materials.  You will have noticed that the pitch of the Horsham-slated roof is unusually flat.  They observed that when the sides of the roof were deeply sloping, as in the case of thatched roofs, the heavy stone slates strained and dragged at the pegs and laths and fell and injured the roof.  Hence they determined to make the slope less steep.  Unfortunately the rain did not then easily run off, and in order to prevent the water penetrating into the house they were obliged to adopt additional precautions.  Therefore they cemented their roofs and stopped them with mortar.

[Illustration:  Cottage at Capel, Surrey ]

Very lovely are these South Country cottages, peaceful, picturesque, pleasant, with their graceful gables and jutting eaves, altogether delightful.  Well sang a loyal Sussex poet:—­

        If I ever become a rich man,
          Or if ever I grow to be old,
        I will build a house with deep thatch[14]
          To shelter me from the cold;
        And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
          And the story of Sussex told.

  [14] I fear the poet’s plans will never be passed by the rural
  district council.

We give some good examples of Surrey cottages at the village of Capel in the neighbourhood of Dorking, a charming region for the study of cottage-building.  There you can see some charming ingle-nooks in the interior of the dwellings, and some grand farm-houses.  Attached to the ingle-nook is the oven, wherein bread is baked in the old-fashioned way, and the chimneys are large and carried up above the floor of the first storey, so as to form space for curing bacon.

[Illustration:  Farm-house, Horsmonden, Kent]

Horsmonden, Kent, near Lamberhurst, is beautifully situated among well-wooded scenery, and the farm-house shown in the illustration is a good example of the pleasant dwellings to be found therein.

East Anglia has no good building-stone, and brick and flint are the principal materials used in that region.  The houses built of the dark, dull, thin old bricks, not of the great staring modern varieties, are very charming, especially when they are seen against a background of wooded hills.  We give an illustration of some cottages at Stow Langtoft, Suffolk.

[Illustration:  Seventeenth-century Cottages, Stow Langtoft, Suffolk]

The old town of Banbury, celebrated for its cakes, its Cross, and its fine lady who rode on a white horse accompanied by the sound of bells, has some excellent “black and white” houses with pointed gables and enriched barge-boards pierced in every variety of patterns, their finials and pendants, and pargeted fronts, which give an air of picturesqueness contrasting strangely with the stiffness of the modern brick buildings.