Outhouse

“ Why, sir, we must not leave the tents where they are, but take them down, and as soon as they are dry, stow them away, for we may want them by and by; then, sir, we must build a large outhouse for our stores and provisions, with a thatched roof, and a floor raised about four feet from the ground; and then, under the floor, the sheep and goats will have a protection from the weather. Then there is the fish-pond to make, and also a salt-pan to cut out of the rock. ”

“ A somewhat larger wooden house and a couple of huts built of slender timbers with the roofs prolonged to form a small, half-open outhouse, is the simple dwelling during the winter months of the hereditary t'umu of the Shera Yögurs, and one which, I am sure, his very unpretentious people consider to be the height of modern comfort. ”

“ When the threshing is over the straw is taken up to the cottages and piled up in an outhouse, or more often in a corner of the kitchen, where it brings a new liveliness of colour.
A few days ago when I was visiting a cottage where there are the most beautiful children on the island, the eldest daughter, a girl of about fourteen, went and sat down on a heap of straw by the doorway. ”

“ As we entered the suburbs, the houses were almost all of one pattern, a barn shape, and the diminutive casements showed that window glass was not yet made in the valley. The poorer houses are small, low, and hut-like; the others, single-storied buildings, somewhat like stables, with many entrances. The best houses resembled East Indian bungalows, with flat roofs and low, shady verandahs, well trellised, and supported by posts or pillars. I looked in vain for the outhouse-harems, in which certain romancers concerning things Mormon had told me that wives were kept, like other stock. ”

“ She had waited here whilst one might count fifty, when she heard a movement in the outhouse--a fragment once attached to the main building. This outhouse was partitioned into an outer and an inner room, which had been a kitchen and a scullery before the connecting erections were pulled down, but they were now used respectively as a brewhouse and workshop, the only means of access to the latter being through the brewhouse. The outer door of this first apartment was usually fastened by a padlock on the exterior. It was now closed, but not fastened. Manston was evidently in the outhouse. ”

“ The home itself lay bare for the most part to the blue sky; only a few shallow outhouses, half room, half verandah, giving shelter from noon-day heat or winter frosts. The rest was courtyard, serving amply for all the needs of the household. In one corner a pile of golden chaff, ready for the milch kine which came in to be fed from the mud mangers ranged against the wall; in another a heap of fuel, and the tall, beehive-like mud receptacles for grain. ”

“ The outhouses, most of them substantially constructed of stone, are surpassed in beauty and extent only by the residence itself. Fields yellow with golden harvest, orchards loaded with fruit, and groves, and parks, and pastures sprinkled with grazing cattle, spread out themselves on every side. ”

“ The cottages we have seen by the roadside have been picturesque but wretched-looking edifices, generally composed of the branches of trees stuck in the ground, plastered with mud and thatched with reeds. Two outhouses, or arbours, consisting of a few posts and sticks, fastened together and overgrown with roses and other flowers, serve respectively as a cool sitting-room and a kitchen, the oven being invariably built on the ground Page 168outside the latter, for the sake of coolness. ”

“ Oh, I tell you that our big house, with its bricked yard, and all the fine, new outhouses, barns, storages for grain and fodder, was a lonesome place those days! And how much more lonesome the nights! ”

“ The dwelling-houses, and contiguous outhouses, are in many instances of the colour of the native rock out of which they have been built; but frequently the dwelling—or Fire-house, as it is ordinarily called—has been distinguished from the barn or byre by roughcast and whitewash, which, as the inhabitants are not hasty in renewing it, in a few years acquires by the influence of weather a tint at once sober and variegated. ”

“ All the domestic offices of every kind being within the four walls of the house itself, there are none of these unsightly outhouses which so much disfigure most of our towns, and so greatly lessen the available garden-space. ”

“ Outhouses should be built with rooms attached, and set apart from the residence of trustworthy patients, for farmer, gardener, dairyman, herdsman, shepherd, and engineer, that those who desired to be employed with them, and might safely be intrusted, and were physically able, could have opportunity of work. ”

“ Crazy old buildings, crowded rear tenements in filthy yards, dark, damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables [3] converted into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes, are habitations of thousands of our fellow-beings in this wealthy, Christian city. ”

“ For the bridges, churches, mansions, cottages, and their richly fringed and flat-roofed outhouses, venerable as the grange of some old abbey, have been substituted structures, in which baldness only seems to have been studied, or plans of the most vulgar utility. ”

“ At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants’ cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller’s boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon.
And over this great demesne Buck ruled. ”

“ And always, between the house-front and the highway, there was a garden, big or little. Sometimes—when the cottage was so small in itself that there seemed no room for a garden-space—there would be a strip, no more than two feet wide, fenced round to guard it from the wandering ducks and geese and dogs of Garth. Sometimes a bigger house would shrink, with disdainful pride, from too close a rubbing of shoulders with the street ”

“ These houses, which form the finish of the suburb, are not big, and are not prosperous; but we see one adorning itself with smoke, and we think of the dead wood coming to life again on the hearth, and of the seated workman, whose hands are rewarded with rest. And that one, although motionless, is alive with children—the breeze is scattering the laughter of their games and seems to play with it, and on the sandy ground are the crumbs of childish footsteps. ”

“ The beaming sun is shining with dazzling radiance on its white walls, telling, in fervent whispers, that a shelter from the heat will be desirable; so here we will enter, where the shadowy trees, and bright stream glancing through the garden flowers, speak of inhabitants from the olden world. A frame building has been joined to the original log-house, and the dwelling thus made large enough to accommodate the household. ”

“ Far enough from the city center to evade the region of dear building-lots, and yet within easy reach of all kinds of door and sash factories and planing-mills, there would be no need of crowding three generations into a single room, and suffocating them with mingled kitchen-fumes and sick-bed odors. Three rooms and an out-house should be the minimum for a family with children. ”

“ If a blackcap or chaffinch sung in one of the trees the strain could be heard in every cottage in the circle. All hear and see the same things, and think and feel the same.
The neighbouring village was neither line, nor circle, but a cluster of cottages. Or rather a group of clusters, so placed that a dozen or more housewives could stand at their respective doors, very nearly facing one another, and confabulate without greatly raising their voices. Outside, all round, the wide open country—grass and tilled land and hedges and hedgerow elms—is spread out before them. ”

“ From house to house, from hut to hut, and from barn to barn, the factor and his menials proceeded, carrying on the work of demolition, until there was scarcely a human habitation left standing in the district. Able-bodied men who, if the matter would rest with a mere trial of physical force, would have bound the factor and his party hand and foot, and sent them out of the district, stood aside as dumb spectators. ”

“ The carpenter who built a farmer's house differentiated it from the barn by putting what he called scroll work up under the eaves and by building at the front a porch with carved posts. After one of the poor little houses had been lived in for a long time, after children had been born and men had died, after men and women had suffered and had moments of joy together in the tiny rooms under the low roofs, a subtle change took place. ”

“ Such was the tenant, who, wearied of her dull suburban home, a red brick house in the middle of a row of red brick houses; tired of the loneliness which never presses so much upon the spirits as when left solitary in the environs of a great city; pining for country liberty, for green trees, and fresh air; much caught by the picturesque-ness of Upton, and its mixture of old-fashioned stateliness and village rusticity ”

“ An old man who had seen, as a boy, the foundation of the new house laid, lived to see it pulled down again, and the very bricks and timber sold upon the spot; and since then the stables have become a farm-house, the tennis-court a sheep-cote, the great quadrangle a rick-yard; and civilization, spreading wave on wave so fast elsewhere, has surged back from that lonely corner of the land—let us hope, only for a while. ”

“ These underground dwellings, burrowed out like rabbits' warrens, with earth floors, no ventilation except a chimney cut in the tufa roof to let the smoke out, and only the one window and door in the front to admit light and air, seem utterly cheerless and uncomfortable, despite our chauffeur's assurances that they have many advantages. ”

“ In some parts of the country these lonely farmhouses are more common than in others. There are, for instance, a good many in the Weald of Sussex which sprang up first as huts in forest clearings, and afterwards became houses with farm-buildings attached to them.
3. On the borders of great lonely heaths and commons we can often see very old and very small cottages, with walls of clay, or wood, or stone, according to the district in which they happen to be. Long ago some squatter built his little hut here, and out of pity, perhaps, or carelessness, the lord of the manor took no notice. ”

“ Not a house is on either of its borders, and no gate opens or path leads to any. Neglect and desertion brood over the contiguous grounds. Indeed, there is but one house standing directly on the roadside until you reach the vicinity of the site of the old meeting-house; and that is owned and occupied by a family that bear the name and are the direct descendants of Rebecca Nurse. On both sides there are the remains of cellars, which declare that once it was lined by a considerable population. ”

“ Almost close beside the handsome villas and mansions along the river, are to be seen the strange dwellings of the poor fishermen, which are scooped out like caves from the hard rock; many of them without any kind of window, receiving the light and air needed from the open door. ”

“ Once beyond the village, where the cottages ceased abruptly, on either side of the road they could smell through the darkness the friendly fields again; and they braced themselves for the last long stretch, the home stretch, the stretch that we know is bound to end, some time, in the rattle of the door-latch, the sudden firelight, and the sight of familiar things greeting us as long-absent travellers from far over-sea. ”

“ While in England in More's day the common people dwelt in "low and homely cottages and poor shepherd huts made at all adventure of every rude piece of timber that came first to hand, with mud walls and ridged roofs thatched over with straw," nests of squalor, filth, and pestilence, in Utopia the houses were spacious, well lighted, airy, comfortable, and clean. ”

“ Three or four times a day we pulled up at some little wayside place, generally only two or three log-houses with painted doors or windows, an occasional potato patch and huge stacks of wood to replenish the fuel of the steamer, and with much yelling they put out a long gangway, and while the wood was brought on board we all went ashore to see the country. The country was always exactly alike, vast and green and lonely, the sparse human habitations emphasising that vastness and loneliness. ”

“ A wooden little village on a stagnant canal, into which carriages do not drive, and where the front doors of the houses are never open; a dead, uninteresting place, neat but not specially pretty, where you are shown into one house got up for the purpose, which looks inside like a crockery shop, and has a stiff little garden with box trained in shapes of animals and furniture. ”

“ That the hill folk remain a rugged and hardy people in spite of unsanitary conditions so gross that I can barely hint at them, is due chiefly to their love of pure air and pure water. No mountain cabin needs a window to ventilate it: there are cracks and cat-holes everywhere, and, as I have said, the doors are always open except at night. “Tight houses,” sheathed or plastered, are universally despised, partly from inherited shiftlessness, partly for less obvious reasons. ”

“ The brook behind my father’s house, in which my bared feet daily waded, turns the wheel of a factory; the trees that shaded our log cabin are metamorphosed into three-story houses; the country has turned into a town—and not more has the form changed than the spirit. ”

“ From the pleasantest cottage of the extreme suburb, and past the more pretentious residences,—every home being provided with an exterior bake-oven, the same as in Germany, Pennsylvania, or portions of Wisconsin and Minnesota, to the shops, stores, hotels and public buildings, every yard, in many instances, fenced with stone gleaned and cleaned from the soil, and, for that matter, every spot upon which the eye rested showed that thrift and not whisky-drinking ruled that place ”