of a man or woman, left room for little more to be said. The main
feature of these barns was their enormous expansion of roof. It was
a comfort to look at them, they suggested such shelter and
protection. The eaves were very low and the ridge-pole very high.
Long rafters and short posts gave them a quaint, short-waisted,
grandmotherly look. They were nearly square, and stood very broad
upon the ground. Their form was doubtless suggested by the damper
climate of the Old World, where the grain and hay, instead of being
packed in deep solid mows, used to be spread upon poles and exposed
to the currents of air under the roof. Surface and not cubic
capacity is more important in these matters in Holland than in this
country. Our farmers have found that, in a climate where there is so
much weather as with us, the less roof you have the better. Roofs
will leak, and cured hay will keep sweet in a mow of any depth and
size in our dry atmosphere.

The Dutch barn was the most picturesque barn that has been built,
especially when thatched with straw, as they nearly all were, and
forming one side of an inclosure of lower roofs or sheds also
covered with straw, beneath which the cattle took refuge from the
winter storms. Its immense, unpainted gable, cut with holes for the
swallows, was like a section of a respectable-sized hill, and its
roof like its slope. Its great doors always had a hood projecting
over them, and the doors themselves were divided horizontally into
upper and lower halves; the upper halves very frequently being left
open, through which you caught a glimpse of the mows of hay, or the
twinkle of flails when the grain was being threshed.

The old Dutch farmhouses, too, were always pleasing to look upon.
They were low, often made of stone, with deep window-jambs and great