honeysuckle that does its best to hide the shabbiness of the shingles and the old waterspout and sagging gutter, and fails miserably when it gets to the farther cornice, which has rotted away, showing under its dismal paint the black and brown rust of decaying wood.

Then way in under the portico comes the door with the nameplate, and next to it, level with the floor of the piazza or portico

either you please, for it is a combination of both are two long French windows, always open in summer evenings and a-light on winter nights with the reflection of the Doctor's softcoal fire, telling of the warmth and cheer within.

For it is a cheery place. It doesn't look like a doctor's office. There are dingy haircloth sofas, it is true, and a row of shelves with bottles, and funny-looking boxes on the mantel-one an electric battery and rows and rows of books on the walls. But there are no dreadful instruments about. If there are, you don't see them.

The big chair he sits in would swallow up a smaller man. It is covered with Turkey red and has a roll cushion for his head. There are two of these chairs one for you, or me; this last has big arms that come out and catch you under the elbows, a mighty help to a man when he has just learned that his liver or lungs or heart or some other part of him has gone wrong and needs overhauling.

Then there is a canary that sings all the time, and a small dog -oh, such a low-down, ill-bred, tousled dog; kind of a dog that might have been raised around a lumber-yard-was, probablyone ear gone, half of his tail missing; and there are some pots of flowers, and on the wall near the window where everybody can see is a case of butterflies impaled on pins and covered by a glass. No, you wouldn't think the Doctor's office a gruesome place, and you certainly wouldn't think the Doctor was a gruesome person not when you come to know him.

LANDOR'S COTTAGE

EDGAR ALLAN POE

more utterly unpre

NOTHING Could well be more simple tending than this cottage. Its marvellous effect lay altogether in its artistic arrangement as a picture. I could have fancied, while I looked at it, that some eminent landscape painter had built it with his brush.

The point of view from which I first saw the cottage was not altogether, although it was nearly, the best point from which to survey the house. I will therefore describe it as I afterwards saw it from a position on the stone wall at the southern ex

treme of the amphitheatre.

The main building was about twenty-four feet long and sixteen broad certainly not more. Its total height, from the ground to the apex of the roof, could not have exceeded eighteen feet. To the west end of this structure was attached one about a third smaller in all its proportions:- the line of its front standing back about two yards from that of the larger house; and the line of its roof, of course, being considerably depressed below that of the roof adjoining. At right angles to these buildings, and from the rear of the main one not exactly in the middle extended a third compartment, very small being, in general, one third less than the western wing. The roofs of the two larger were very steep sweeping down from the ridge-beam with a long concave curve, and extending at least four feet beyond the walls in front, so as to form the roofs of two piazzas. These latter roofs, of course, needed no support; but as they had the air of needing it, slight and perfectly plain. pillars were inserted at the corners alone. The roof of the northern wing was merely an extension of a portion of the main roof. Between the chief building and western wing arose a very tall and rather slender square chimney of hard Dutch bricks, alternately black and red, - a slight cornice of projecting bricks at the top. Over the gables the roofs also projected very much, - in the main building about four feet to the east and two to the

west. The principal door was not exactly in the main division, being a little to the east while the two windows were to the west. These latter did not extend to the floor, but were much longer and narrower than usual - they had single shutters like doors the panes were of lozenge form, but quite large. The door itself had its upper half of glass, also in lozenge panes - a movable shutter secured it at night. The door to the west wing was in its gable, and quite simple a single window looked out to the south. There was no external door to the north wing, and it also had only one window to the east.

The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the widely projecting cave these steps gave access to a door leading into the garret, or rather loft for it was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to have been intended as a store-room. The piazzas of the main building and western wing had no floors, as is usual; but at the doors and at each window, large, flat, irregular slabs of granite lay embedded in the delicious turf, affording comfortable footing in all weather. Excellent paths of the same material - not nicely adapted, but with the velvety sod filling frequent intervals between the stones, led hither and thither from the house, to a crystal spring about five paces off, to the road, or to one or two out-houses that lay to the north, beyond the brook, and were thoroughly concealed by a few locusts and catalpas.

Not more than six steps from the main door of the cottage stood the dead trunk of a fantastic pear-tree, so clothed from head to foot in the gorgeous begonia blossoms that one required no little scrutiny to determine what manner of sweet thing it could be. From various arms of this tree hung cages of different kinds. In one, a large wicker cylinder with a ring at top, revelled a mocking bird; in another, an oriole; in a third the impudent bobolink while three or four more delicate prisons were loudly vocal with canaries.

The pillars of the piazza were enwreathed in jasmine and sweet honeysuckle; while from the angle formed by the main struc

ture and its west wing, sprang a grapevine of unexampled luxuriance. Scorning all restraint, it had clambered first to the lower roof - then to the higher; and along the ridge of this latter it continued to writhe on, throwing out tendrils to the right and left, until at length it fairly attained the east gable, and fell trailing over the stairs.

The whole house, with its wings, was constructed of the oldfashioned Dutch shingles - broad, and with unrounded corners. It is a peculiarity of this material to give houses built of it the appearance of being wider at bottom than top after the manner of Egyptian architecture; and in the present instance, this exceedingly picturesque effect was aided by numerous pots of gorgeous flowers that almost encompassed the base of the buildings.

The shingles were painted a dull gray; and the happiness with which this neutral tint melted into the vivid green of the tulip tree leaves that partially overshadowed the cottage, can readily be conceived by an artist.

From the position near the stone wall, as described, the buildings were seen at great advantage for the southeastern angle was thrown forward so that the eye took in at once the whole of the two fronts, with the picturesque eastern gable, and at the same time obtained just a sufficient glimpse of the northern wing, with parts of a pretty roof to the spring-house, and nearly half of a light bridge that spanned the brook in the near vicinity of the main buildings.

THE ANCIENT PALACE AT JEYPORE 1

RUDYARD KIPLING

THE Englishman went into this palace built of stone, bedded on stone, springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone. ways nothing but stone. Presently, he stumbled across a

1 From From Sea to Sea.

little temple of Kali, a gem of marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning, very cold.

If, as Viollet-le-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or — but here the annals of Rajputana contradict the theory to act openly. The cramped and darkened rooms, the narrow smoothwalled passages with recesses where a man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and descending stairs leading nowhither, the ever-present screens of marble tracery that may hide or reveal so much, - all these things breathe of plot and counterplot, league and intrigue. In a living palace where the sight-seer knows and feels that there are human beings everywhere, and that he is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost unendurable. In a dead palace-a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end, though the graybeards who plotted knew it not, the coming of the British tourist with guide-book and sun-hat-oppression gives place to simply impertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into all parts of the palace, for there was no one to stop him not even the ghosts of the dead Queens - through ivory-studded doors, into the women's quarters, where a stream of water once flowed over a chiselled marble channel. A creeper had set its hand upon the lattice there, and there was the dust of old nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the lady of light virtue who managed to become possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singh's library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of Pleasure beyond the screen-work? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of Audience that the order went forth that the Chief of Birjooghar was to be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen clattered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore? There were questions innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell; but the only answer was the cooing of the pigeons.

If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the