our own home history, only an earlier chapter of it, still more romantic and absorbing.
The Sparrow house takes its name, legitimately, from the family with whose fortunes it was longtime connected, but all the rhyme and reason there was in calling its American adaptation “the Rabbit house’’ existed alone in the lively imagination of the architect who fancied his accomplice in the conspiracy resembled a rabbit. In the central oriel of the garden front there is a carved rabbit bearing a banner charged with the letter E and flanked by the initials of the builders surmounted by coronets. There are rabbits also in cartouches inserted in the leaded work of the windows, and other devices of a more or less personal nature besides Mdlles. Lapine are distributed about other parts of the house. The commercial argument condemns this sort of thing. It is thought to militate against the ready sale of a piece of property in case it becomes desirable to sell. But that commercial argument is now a back number. People are only too glad to buy places, I have discovered, with these sentimental touches. The value of an historic dwelling at
Portsmouth, N. H., is enhanced materially because the autograph of our erratic admiral, John Paul Jones, happens to be scratched with a diamond on a pane of glass in one of the windows, and the present
owner of the Perry mansion in Providence, R. I., religiously preserves the busts of the founders of the estate in 1789, which preside over its charming, Colonial gateway, though no family relation whatever exists.
Unquestionably most curious of all the curious features of the Sparrow house is the archaic style of pargeting which ornaments its wall surface. It is not the classic pargeting that ornaments the famous Roman villas, but a distinctly genre, homemade-looking pargeting which, like the school of Flemish painting with its distorted not to say gro
tesque figures intended to be human, is a work of art just the same. It seemed to me to be useless to attempt anything of this kind for the Rabbit house, for I was convinced that one of our American winters would soon put any pargeting completely out of business. The next most remarkable feature is the oriels, unless it be the heroic cornice which forms a roof for the oriels.
Folks wonder how all these odd and curious windows of the English houses open. Well, they don’t open, leastwise many of them do not. You see, at the time of the introduction of glazed windows into houses other than those belonging to the princes and noblemen in England, when the great building activity of the Tudor reigns began, it was like some wonderful modern improvement of our own day to be able to contemplate at leisure the inclemency of the weather without, through windows formerly draught pockets, and yet be snug and comfortable within. Only a “d. f.” ever thought of opening the casements to defeat the very purposes for which they were designed. Even today, in the wayside inns (they call them “pubs”), you will find that the windows of the coffee room (dining-room of gentility) like as not are stationary. Once I had to change my lodgings simply because of this, and I am no
RABBIT HOUSE
RABBIT HOUSE
The Sparrow house takes its name, legitimately, from the family with whose fortunes it was longtime connected, but all the rhyme and reason there was in calling its American adaptation “the Rabbit house’’ existed alone in the lively imagination of the architect who fancied his accomplice in the conspiracy resembled a rabbit. In the central oriel of the garden front there is a carved rabbit bearing a banner charged with the letter E and flanked by the initials of the builders surmounted by coronets. There are rabbits also in cartouches inserted in the leaded work of the windows, and other devices of a more or less personal nature besides Mdlles. Lapine are distributed about other parts of the house. The commercial argument condemns this sort of thing. It is thought to militate against the ready sale of a piece of property in case it becomes desirable to sell. But that commercial argument is now a back number. People are only too glad to buy places, I have discovered, with these sentimental touches. The value of an historic dwelling at
Portsmouth, N. H., is enhanced materially because the autograph of our erratic admiral, John Paul Jones, happens to be scratched with a diamond on a pane of glass in one of the windows, and the present
owner of the Perry mansion in Providence, R. I., religiously preserves the busts of the founders of the estate in 1789, which preside over its charming, Colonial gateway, though no family relation whatever exists.
Unquestionably most curious of all the curious features of the Sparrow house is the archaic style of pargeting which ornaments its wall surface. It is not the classic pargeting that ornaments the famous Roman villas, but a distinctly genre, homemade-looking pargeting which, like the school of Flemish painting with its distorted not to say gro
tesque figures intended to be human, is a work of art just the same. It seemed to me to be useless to attempt anything of this kind for the Rabbit house, for I was convinced that one of our American winters would soon put any pargeting completely out of business. The next most remarkable feature is the oriels, unless it be the heroic cornice which forms a roof for the oriels.
Folks wonder how all these odd and curious windows of the English houses open. Well, they don’t open, leastwise many of them do not. You see, at the time of the introduction of glazed windows into houses other than those belonging to the princes and noblemen in England, when the great building activity of the Tudor reigns began, it was like some wonderful modern improvement of our own day to be able to contemplate at leisure the inclemency of the weather without, through windows formerly draught pockets, and yet be snug and comfortable within. Only a “d. f.” ever thought of opening the casements to defeat the very purposes for which they were designed. Even today, in the wayside inns (they call them “pubs”), you will find that the windows of the coffee room (dining-room of gentility) like as not are stationary. Once I had to change my lodgings simply because of this, and I am no
RABBIT HOUSE
RABBIT HOUSE