Big House

“ The Big House, surrounded by its well-trimmed gardens sloping down to the broad Rancocus, with its comfortable apartments, and the diversified prospect which it commands, offers a resting-place which, although deep in the genuine forest, combines urban refinement with the quiet and seclusion of country-life. ”

“ It was a home taking firm hold upon the soil, its wide roots reaching into traditions of more than one generation. Well toward the head of the vast Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the richest region on the face of the whole earth, the Big House ruled over these wide acres as of immemorial right. Its owner, Colonel Calvin Blount, was a king, an American king, his right to rule based upon full proof of fitness.
In the heart of the only American part of America, the Big House, careless and confident, could afford to lie blinking at the sun, or at the broad acres which blinked back at it. ”

“ The Big House, with all its worthy marvels and bizarre novelties, competed with the figure of Paula Forrest in filling the content of his imagination. Once again, and yet again, many times, he saw the slender fingers of Dar Hyal weaving argument in the air, the black whiskers of Aaron Hancock enunciating Bergsonian dogmas, the frayed coat-cuffs of Terrence McFane articulating thanks to God for the two-legged work-beasties that enabled him to loaf at Dick Forrest’s board and under Dick Forrest’s madroño trees. ”

“ Outside Paula’s sisters and intimates, on rare occasions some artist was permitted to enter and catch his breath. Graham had heard of its existence, but not even him had she invited to see.
It was round, and small enough to escape giving any cold hint of spaciousness. The Big House was of sturdy concrete, but here was marble in exquisite delicacy. The arches of the encircling arcade were of fretted white marble that had taken on just enough tender green to prevent any glare of reflected light. ”

“ Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter, “here’s some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House. I’ve seen the servants’ dining room. Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It’s a boarding house in itself. ”

“ Here in the dull and gloomy Corner House, with its dark and gloomy tragedy, cheek by jowl with the hardness and glitter and brilliancy of Lytton Avenue. If my adventurer wants a big dark cupboard to hide things, where can she have a better one than the Corner House! ”

“ Between the streets of the rich and parallel to them, run the alleys of the poor. The rich man’s garage jostles elbows with the poor man’s dwelling.
In a big house fronting on one of the most fashionable streets lived a little girl named Ethel. Other people lived in the big house also, a father, a mother, a butler, a French maid, and a host of other servants. Back of the big house was the garage. Facing the garage on the other side of the alley was a little, old one-story-and-a-half brick house. In this house dwelt a little girl named Maggie. ”

“ And there at least C. A. Johnson has built himself a tremendously big house, a perfect mansion. It has a veranda below and a balcony above and scroll work all the way around the roof.... The small town too has its great men, its solid families with their fine sons and daughters, its immutableness and authority. And the small world is absorbed in its great men and follows their career with interest. The good small town folk are really acting to their own advantage in doing this; they live in the shelter of authority, and it is good for them. ”

“ When the Delawares pray in the Big House, they raise their voices and cry ‘Ho-o-o’ to God, and the Mĭsiʹngw‛ hears it and understands, for he is of the same nature as a tree, and there are twelve Mĭsiʹngw‛ carved in the Big House who will carry the prayers to the twelfth Heaven. The Indians call the Mĭsiʹngw‛ ‘Grandfather,’ because the trees were here before the Indians. The Big House is going out of use now, because only the old people have had gifts or visions of power to sing about. ”

“ When a man is rich enough to build himself a big new house, he remembers some old house which he once admired, and he has it imitated with all the technical skill and care that can be had in America. This accounts for the odd jumble of styles in Fifth Avenue, along the lakeside in Chicago, in the new avenues in St. Louis and elsewhere. One millionaire's house is modeled on a French château, another on an old Colonial house in Virginia, another on a monastery in Mexico, another is like an Italian palazzo. And their imitations are never weak or pretentious. ”

“ I still hadn't seen the little man by the time I reached the big white house with the four car garage. The house itself had one of those old colonial porches with six pillars holding up a porch roof with unnecessary solidity. Between the pillars brightly lit huge windows brought a clear view of the interior.
A party of some sort was going on. That's the way it looked. People standing in small groups holding glasses.
I hesitated. I wanted a three dollar bill, but was it worth it, to go up to the door and ask for someone I didn't know? ”

“ Well, Howard Gray, the first of them little changes is to be a great big piazza, to go across the whole front of the house! 'The kitchen porch is so small an' crowded,' says she, 'an' you can't see the river from there; I want a place to sit out evenings. Can't I have the fireplaces in my rooms unbricked,' she went on, 'an' the rooms re-papered an' painted? An', oh,—I've never lived in a house where there wasn't a bathroom before, an' I want to make that big closet with a window off my bedroom into one. ”

“ The big house did prove a Palace Beautiful, though it took some time for all to get in, and Beth found it very hard to pass the lions. ”

“ A key is produced, and an odd little white door, through which no fat man could penetrate even sideways, is opened; I ascend a steep flight of a dozen steps, and enter my toy-castle: my own independent, solitary, miniature mansion.
The first room is the drawing-room. It is about the size of a large packing-case, with a gay looking-glass and clock, with bright red chairs and sofa, with a cosy round table, with a big window looking out on another Pavilion opposite, and on a great house set back in a courtyard. ”

“ When Forrest went through the French windows from his sleeping-porch, he crossed, first, a comfortable dressing room, window-divaned, many-lockered, with a generous fireplace, out of which opened a bathroom; and, second, a long office room, wherein was all the paraphernalia of business—­desks, dictaphones, filing cabinets, book cases, magazine files, and drawer-pigeonholes that tiered to the low, beamed ceiling. ”

“ In the meantime every fence is placarded with ‘Speed the Plough!’ on one side, and ‘The Big Loaf!’ on the other. The first man you meet thinks the landlord a devourer of widows’ houses; to the next the mill-owner is an ogre grinding men’s bones to make his bread. Even at the Gatehouse I doubt if you will escape the excitement, though there is not a field of wheat within a mile of it! ”

“ Chapter XXIV As luck would have it, beyond chance guests for lunch or dinner, the Big House was empty. In vain, on the first and second days, did Dick lay out his work, or defer it, so as to be ready for any suggestion from Paula to go for an afternoon swim or drive.
He noted that she managed always to avoid the possibility of being kissed. From her sleeping porch she called good night to him across the wide patio. In the morning he prepared himself for her eleven o'clock greeting. Mr. Agar and Mr. ”

“ The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. ”

“ Between the aboriginal wigwam, whose first and only floor is the bare earth itself, and the 'high-basement-four-story-and-French-roof' style, there is somewhere the happy medium which our blessed posterity—blessed in having had such wise ancestors—will universally adopt as the fittest survivor of our uncounted fashions. I fancy it will be much nearer to this one-story house, with the high basement and big attic, than to the seven-story mansard with sub-cellar for fuel and furnace. Still the tendency during the last fifty years has been upward. ”

“ We found a wide hall with a grand staircase; a roomy parlor connecting by folding door with a spacious dining-room, and off the dining-room a real conservatory, all glass and tiles. Opening into the pantry a swinging door, and another into the kitchen, and in the wall a refrigerator. In the basement a [Pg 12] furnace with a barometer and thermometer atop. On the second floor four big rooms and a centre hallway, and in the bathroom large, open plumbing and the addition of a shower and spray bath. On the third floor two cozy rooms and another hallway and bath. Item: Slate roof ”

“ The lessee of his estates had let them advantageously to four substantial farmers; one of whom occupied the venerable old manor-house. Its quaint wooden gables and ornamental carpentry always arrested the attention of the passer by their venerable appearance.
A bay window, with five lights in two divisions, marked very distinctly the situation of the great hall; a noble apartment used only by the tenant as a vast store-room for the produce of his orchard and his garden. ”

“ Yet it gave all the year round,—a fact which weak critics often overlook when they talk about a useless room, and laugh in their dreaded but unproductive way,—gave all the year round a sense of ample accommodation and dignity to the mansion. From the kitchen a winding staircase ascended to the upper rooms. The small landing-place rested on the back wall of the house. Small garrets were over these rooms. The cellar was of the size of the dwelling, and [Pg 208] afforded no hiding-place, nor any means of access to the interior from without, which we could not easily secure. ”

“ This confusion of two essentially different types of room, designed for essentially different phases of life, has been caused by the fact that the architect, when called upon to build a grand house, has simply enlarged, instead of altering, the maison bourgeoise that has hitherto been the accepted model of the American gentleman's house; for it must not be forgotten that the modern American dwelling descends from the English middle-class 135 house, not from the aristocratic country-seat or town residence. ”

“ Our modern builders and architects had—until perhaps quite recently—only one idea of a small house, the house, namely, which to-day characterizes the monotonous streets in the poorer quarters of our new towns, with its front door and bow window on one side, its offices behind, and its two other sides left blank for other houses to stand against. This is a town house. Yet our modern builders use it, all by itself, in the most desolate country districts. ”

“ Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the destiny of a luxurious dilettante, living at the very center of bonded respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad avenue which is right at both ends! ”

“ In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden-wall, belonging to a house under repair:—the white house opposite the collar-maker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a waggon-load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here. ”

“ We have been hunting about for a permanent country home in the neighborhood, but no house is so difficult to get as one which has at once seclusion and convenience of position, which is neither of the suburban-villa style nor of the grand hall and castle dimensions. ”

“ In a word, a hundred points of deep and exciting interest, picturesquely beautiful and historically interesting, may be seen and “taken note of,” from the several points to which a drive through the Park conducts.
We give an engraving of the mansion. Parts of it are as old as the reign of Henry VIII., but its outward signs of remote age are few; it seems built for comfort; it is thoroughly a domestic house; the rooms are neither large, lofty, nor stately; but all of them are made to live in—so many parts of a home. We may except the Great Hall, however ”

“ It is that their buildings have not been fine and austere enough. They have, in short, not treated their banking business sufficiently seriously.
25 V.
THE SMALL SUBURBAN HOUSE. Not only at election times, but always under modern conditions, the very small house is the most important unit in our towns. As long as the mechanic, the small tradesman, and the black-coated poor prefer to live in separate dwellings under separate roofs, each thinking of his little box of bricks as an Englishman’s castle, their little houses will occupy a larger space than any other type of building. ”

“ There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain house within my familiar recollection,—one of those peaked-gable (there are seven of them) , projecting-storied edifices, such as you occasionally see in our older towns,—a rusty, crazy, creaky, dry-rotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched window over the porch, and a little shop-door on one side, and a great, melancholy elm before it! ”