good dressing; while bricks, like ghosts, come forth from their
purgatory for the express purpose of being laid. All of these, by
appropriate treatment, are invested with graces and glories that by
nature they never owned. But a tree, graceful, noble, and grand beyond
all human imitation, is ignominiously hewn down, every natural beauty
disguised or annihilated, and its helpless form compelled to assume
most uncouth shapes and grimmest colors.

[Illustration: THE GROVES WERE GOD'S FIRST TEMPLES.]

Of late our injustice is greater and more disastrous; for we are
destroying the very sources of supply without providing for the
future, using wood in large quantities where other materials would be
better and cheaper. Yet we think ourselves very economical. Once it
was common to enclose wood buildings of all grades by walls at least
ten or twelve inches thick, sometimes much more, and solid at that.
They were called log-houses. Now it is the fashion to use two by four
inch studs standing in rows at such distances that the whole substance
of the frame in a single sheet would be about half an inch thick.
These are suggestively called balloon frames. The former would be huge
and inconvenient, the latter are often fair and frail. That the frame
of the outer wall of a wooden building should be mainly vertical is
evident, the outer studs, if possible, extending from the sill to the
plates, and as many of the inner ones as may be reaching through both
stories, especially those by the staircase, where the shrinking of the
second-floor timbers will reveal ugly cracks and crooks. That the
greatest strength and economy of material are secured by sawing logs
into thin, wide scantling is also beyond question, but don't try to
save too closely on a bill of timber. A thousand feet added to the
width of the studs and the depth of the joist will make the difference