of the village. In the New England village, on the other hand, the finer
and the poorer houses stand side by side along the road. There are wide
straight streets overarched with spreading elms and maples, and on
either side stand the houses, with little green lawns in front, called
in rustic parlance "door-yards." The finer houses may stand a thousand
feet apart from their neighbours on either side, while between the
poorer ones there may be intervals of from twenty to one hundred feet,
but they are never found crowded together in blocks. Built in this
capacious fashion, a village of a thousand inhabitants may have a main
street more than a mile in length, with half a dozen crossing streets
losing themselves gradually in long stretches of country road. The
finest houses are not ducal palaces, but may be compared with the
ordinary country-houses of gentlemen in England. The poorest houses are
never hovels, such as one sees in the Scotch Highlands. The picturesque
and cosy cottage at Shottery, where Shakespeare used to do his courting,
will serve very well as a sample of the humblest sort of old-fashioned
New England farm-house. But most of the dwellings in the village come
between these extremes. They are plain neat wooden houses, in
capaciousness more like villas than cottages. A New England village
street, laid out in this way, is usually very picturesque and beautiful,
and it is highly characteristic. In comparing it with things in Europe,
where one rarely finds anything at all like it, one must go to something
very different from a village. As you stand in the Court of Heroes at
Versailles and look down the broad and noble avenue that leads to
Paris, the effect of the vista is much like that of a New England
village street. As American villages grow into cities, the increase in
the value of land usually tends to crowd the houses together into blocks
as in a European city. But in some of our western cities founded and
settled by people from New England, this spacious fashion of building
has been retained for streets occupied by dwelling-houses. In