COUNTRY LIFE
PAYING a visit to a remote manor in my neighbourhood, I passed throitgh the patch of new buildings tacked on to my village as to every other. First, the utilitarian new houses with the elongated window-panes dis- torting shapeliness. A strip of garden to each, and then the incongruous curb on either side of the new road. Beyond, a section of prairie with the seeding grasses curtseying to the breeze. Our age is presumed to be suffering from a surfeit of planning. But, unless we are to judge these novel appendages to our villages to be museum pieces, it is difficult to follow any rhyme or reason for their layout and construction. Exhibit A—a patch of wilderness ; Exhibit B (the curbs)—a specimen of pseudo- urbanism ; Exhibit C—how not to build small houses. The new road is so narrow that the curbs are a positve danger to traffic ; the grasses, alas, are a familiar example of the- waste of good hay carried over thousands of miles of the grass-verges to our roads, while, as for the houses, is there any cause in nature why the principles of good design should be perpetually at war with " every modern convenience " ?
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