THE WEAKNESS AND SHAM OF BRICKWORK.


My Dear Architect: You must have had a brick in your hat when you
launched your last letter. I suppose there's no doubt that brick walls
will stand thunder and lightning in the shape of Chicago fire and
Boston gunpowder better than anything else. In fact, I've always had a
notion that if there are any houses in a certain place where they
don't need them to keep out the cold, they must be made of brick,
Milton's gorgeous testimony to the contrary notwithstanding. But when
you undertake to show up the softness and beauty of brickwork, you
soar a little too high for me. If our masons would only make walls
that are able to bear their own weight; not use more than half as much
mortar as brick, and that made of sand instead of dirt; if they would
build chimney-flues that will carry the smoke to the top of the
building, instead of leaving it to ooze out around the window-frames a
dozen feet away, as I once saw it in a costly building belonging to
one of our ex-governors, and remember that a wooden joist running
square across a chimney-flue is pretty sure to get up a bigger draught
than most of us care for; if they wouldn't fill up the inside of the
wall with bricks that it isn't safe to drop for fear they can never be
picked up again; in short, if they'd do the work that can't be seen
half as well as what is in plain sight, I'd never say a word about
beauty, I wouldn't even ask for those elegant caps the masons are so
fond of poking out over windows. You can find at least ten thousand
such in Springfield. Some folks paint them, sprinkle sand into the
paint, and then go on their wicked way rejoicing in the notion that
they have told such a cunning lie as "no feller can find out."

Now and then the corner of a brick building is cobbled up into blocks