Let us try grouping the windows a little, and at the same time breaking up the flat surface of the front wall (Fig. 12).  Here, as before, we have divided the building by a horizontal string, but only by one main one on the first floor level, keeping the same contrast, however, between a richer portion above and a plainer portion below; we have divided the building vertically, also, by two projecting bays finishing in gables, thus breaking also the skyline of the roof, and giving it a little picturesqueness, and we have grouped the windows, instead of leaving them as so many holes in the wall at equal distances.  The contrast between the ground and first floor windows is more emphatic; and it is now the more evident that the upper floor rooms are the best apartments, from their ample windows; it is also pretty evident that the first floor is divided into two main rooms with large bay windows, and a smaller room or a staircase window, between them; the second floor windows are also shifted up higher, the two principal ones going in to the gables, showing that the rooms below them have been raised in height.  Windows carried up the full height of these rooms, however, might be too large either for repose internally or for appearance externally, so the wall intervening between the top of these and the sill of the gables is a good field for some decorative treatment, confined to the bays, so as to assist in separating them from the straight wall which forms the background to them.

[Illustration:  Fig. 12]

So far we have treated our building only as a private house.  Without altering its general scale and shape we may suggest something entirely different from a private house.  On Fig. 13, we have tried to give a municipal appearance to it, as if it were the guild hall of a small country town.  The plain basement and the wide principal doorway, and the row of three very large equal-spaced windows above, render it unquestionable that this is a building with a low ground story, and one large room above.  A certain “public building” effect is given to it by the large and enriched cornice with balustrade above and paneling below, and by the accentuation of the angles by projecting piers, and by the turrets over them, which give it quite a different character from that of a private house.

[Illustration:  Fig. 13]

If, on the other hand, the building were the free library and reading room of the same small country town, we should have little doubt of this if we saw it as in Fig. 14, with the walls all blank (showing that they are wanted for ranging something against, and cannot be pierced for windows), and windows only in the upper portion.  Similarly, if we want to build it as the country bank, we should have to put the large windows on the ground floor, bank clerks wanting plenty of light, and the ground story being always the principal one; and we might indulge the humor of giving it a grim fortress-like strength by a rusticated plinth (i.e., stones left or worked rough and rock-like) and by very massive piers between the windows, and a heavy cornice over them; the residential upper floor forming a low story subordinate to the bank story.  It is true this would not satisfy a banker, who always wants classic pilasters stuck against the walls, that being his hereditary idea of bank expression in architecture.