and re-awakening in age, which is to insure and ennoble its best development. step on the road to Beulah. A steep wastes of cities, it must be the clingstair everywhere, and everyhow-except ing child-love, wakening in manhood, in a ship's steerage is an offence and a blight and a curse. But for an easy, hospitable, broad, cheery, inviting stairway flanking a country hall, or engrossing one end of it, or dominating it by a great swing of its galleries or landing, what a noble chance is given to the architect! What woody rioting there may be in balusters-in screens lifting up to the support of great beams in the ceiling, in arches disguising the changing levels, in flashes from mosaic windows, pouring glories on the floor! We might fill our pages with pretty illustrations thereanent; but from all we should very likely come back to a quickened love for those old simplicities which associate perfect ease with severest of lines. As for collocation of rooms in country houses, there is happily no occasion for all those Chinese puzzlings and dove-tailings of parts which city architects find it needful to study. There is, or should be, space to thrust out a room or a bay or an L, where we need it; and as for the sun, windows may be set to welcome it. The morning sun, by all means, should come to the family room, to the children's room, and to the breakfast-room; as for the afternoon sun, let it strike where it will. In all our latitudes, south or north, the southwest angle of a house is, I think, the treasured angle-most to be coveted for chambers, for work-room, for (if it must be) sick-room. The sun stays there longest; the blues vanish fastest. The wants of children, too, must not be left out of sight, unless we determine to legislate them away, and make Mr. Malthus our saint. There's no indoor romping-ground for a child like a great garret, with dormers to let in sunlight like a deluge. The quaint, big old houses, we have shown, had them; and a healthy child, without chance for rainyday forays in such, must grow up with a large domestic element of its nature undeveloped. Home ties of those young folk grapple to a bare roof-tree in the top of the house very clingingly. And if country life is not to be subverted altogether, and turned adrift on the By the same ruling there must be out-of-door regalement and comforters of the child-age. "Out-of-doors" is a very large part of a well-balanced country house; this is an Irishism, maybe; but it is a wholesome one to consider and act upon. "Out-of-doors" in cities does not tie to the dwelling; it lacks privacy; it lacks consecration; it is every man's; and so no man's. There should be tennis-ground; there should be coasting hill; there should be skating-pond, snow forts, and fortresses of stone; cabins for cooking-for picnicing, for learning the ductilities that belong to the offices of hostess. Home is the word; to give great quickening sense to it, to ennoble it, to endear it, to justify it; this is, or ought to be, the aim where roof-trees are planted in the open of God's country. One of the greatest of lacks, as appears to me, in the pretty Bellamy programmes of social fixtures, is that they disjoint and fling apart all old and relishable ideas of home, leaving no place for their development. Such schemes legislate away need for it: for, what is home without its tea-pot singing on the hearth, without its rallying-place at the fireside for family seclusion; without its "tableround," where books, games, singing, talk-unhampered by over-critical ears fill up the eventide; without, maybe, its household mishaps of kitchen or larder, bewraying the management and compelling virtues of self-denial — of gracious reticence of quiet, brave reconcilement with the accidents of life? Gardens, too; what is your country house without a garden? And by garden I mean all those encompassing or outlying things of green which need coaxing, and training, and loving, for their development. There need be no great trail of such-no sheltering quadrangular courts. But surely no mistress can wear so beautiful and so cheap an adornment as a flower. Timid ones need not be frightened with bugbear stories of how B- raises tomatoes at cost of a dollar each, and his chrysanthemums at perfume; and the fruit a man picks from his own "graffing" has subtle flavors that trace back through all the gardens in books. I do not believe a man can be proper æsthetic master of what belongs to a country house-to its amplitudes or proportions, or harmonies (pace, Mr. Architect)-except he see his way to them through alleys of green. Great reach and tale of acres upon acres are not essential. I do not know but the rural instincts are more deeply and certainly stirred by some old half-country half-town house, where the village road brings its carryall in shower-timenearness to the door. I have such an one very plainly in my mind's eye, as I write; the low ceilings (which would make modern fine builders stand aghast), couple cosily with the old-time chairs; the sun is shining through vases that carry dainty blossoms in southern windows; the great sweep of fifty-yearold Norway spruces (which some livers by the sea opinionate can never become great, lusty trees), put their dark fringes of boughs wooingly to the shaven green; the little terraced bit of old garden (a Brobdignag handkerchief would cover giving out perfume like the breath of babes; masses of moss-pink, too, spreading rosy bloom, and hedges of box, with strange mystic scent from their stirred leaves-odors of dead years. It is only a week since that I came upon record-in the pleasant London Garden-of a Gloucestershire parson, who wrote with unction and zeal and knowledge of his miniature vicarage ground, and of his rockwork." 'Six feet by eight, with twenty-one different species of plants growing in it, and all thriving;" and he goes on to detail other horticultural triumphs, pleasant, fine, and positive, though only himself and a "fag of all work" keep the exterior machinery of the modest country home he lived in on the move and on the make. Not money-making, to be sure; that reckoning were a dishonest way of estimating the subtle pleasures of those who, like the Gloucestershire parson, enwrap themselves-spring-time and autumnin the delights of a rural home. That figure of the factotum, too, has its country sufficiencies, and touches of familiar regalement for a good many of us who have conspired with sympathetic architects for a home in the country: 'tis not a de Coverley picture, this factotum; lean and slight; cocking his eye with a knowing upturn to read all promises of weather; not pinning his beliefs to newspaper probabilities; scanning the roses, and the beans, and the carrots, with a serener faith in their growing powers than comes of books; doubledup, odd whiles, with agues; but slouching to his rainy-day plantings under a great cover of draggled clothes; too old to be taught; crowding down your finer knowledges with Solomon-like sayings, and enforcing their wisdom with a sharp catarrhal discharge between thumb and forefinger; honest as the day, and with a humorsome joy shimmering in his face when he sees long-doubted seeds of his saving breaking the ground, and stays his hoe for a new lighting of his brier pipe; old and rheumatic, but finding compensation in his mastery of the ground and the seasons. If I were to search in a wide New England neighborhood for one who enjoyed most, and made the most of a country home-because of its country beans, and cares as tenderly for every shrub and blooming thing as for the kittens that frolic at the door. These addenda, these surroundings, are to be considered in any estimate of the forms which a country house should take, and for the conditions which it should most wisely fulfil. No country house which does not mate with "allround" country laws can be architecturally good. Strip the vines and the grouped masses of foliage from that old Bartram house, of which we spoke in an earlier page, and there is left only a coarse, bare hulk of wall. Shear away those piles of foliage-those bristling points of firs which approach and environ it, and-by proper occasions of retreat-leave embayments of sunny turf around the great Genesee house, which was figured upon an earlier page, and we should fatally misjudge it. modest country house-so well known-of Sunnyside, which was for so long, and worthily, a quickener of rural instincts, owes no small proportion of its charm to its entourage of foliage and the great That old Dutch weather-vane put to its spinning over the crow-foot gable that rose above his southern porch. The dogs, the kittens, the doves, the cows, even the pigs of his country home, were all companionable with him; and he loved the things of the garden: not the flowers only, and the little trap of a green-house he had improvised in a corner, but the trim rows of vegetables as well. With what a rare gusto (if I may play the reporter upon the weaknesses of a host) he looked upon the yellowing melons, bathing in the sunshine, and on the purple glories of the egg-plants! "Not like them! (with a wondering lift of the eyebrows) why, a broiled slice of one is richer than a rasher of bacon." A AFRICAN RIVER AND LAKE SYSTEMS. By Thomas Stevens. SSUMING that a shower of rain, extending over a few hundred square miles of territory in the region immediately southwest of the Albert Nyanza, central Africa, fell when this magazine went to press, such of the rainfall as was not absorbed by the soil is now hurrying oceanward in three opposite directions. Part will reach the Mediterranean by way of the Nile; some will join the Zambezi and the Shirè to the Indian Ocean; and the remainder will help swell the volume of the Congo, which pours a mighty stream six miles wide into the Atlantic. In the light of Mr. Henry M. Stanley's recent geographical discoveries in connection with the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, it seems not unlikely that the area of this shower might even be restricted to a very small compass about the headwaters of the newly discovered Semliki River. The marvellous scope of these African waterways has been thrust upon our notice of late, with other features of African geography, by the interest in the development of the Dark Continent that has been intensified by the rescue of Emin, and the scramble for territory by the European powers. When the writer left Zanzibar in December, 1889, after meeting Stanley, the European colony there were discussing an interesting item of news that had been received by cable from Mozambique. Two Frenchmen, accompanied by about half a dozen natives of the West Coast, had crossed Africa almost entirely by water. These intrepid voyageurs, according to the cablegram, had journeyed up the Congo to its headwaters, and thence down, Lake Nyassa, the Shirè, and Zambezi to Quilliane. They had performed the journey in something less than a year; had met with no hostility worth mentioning from the natives, and had done no very difficult overland marching. About the time that these travellers were setting out on their journey, Stanley was making a note of the fact that one could almost cast a stone from the head-waters of the Aruwimi into the Albert Nyanza, -practically, the Nile. And if that stone were buoyant as cork, there would be nothing to prevent it floating to the Mediterranean. Ten minutes' march took us from the head of the stream draining toward the Ituri (Aruwimi), to the spot where we saw the Nyanza at our feet," are Mr. Stanley's words. A month after leaving Zanzibar I was in Cairo talking about African trade routes with Mason Bey, who with Prout explored the White Nile and the Albert Nyanza for the Egyptian Government in 1877. We were discussing the best routes into the interior, and Mason stated that it was possible to travel from Cairo to Kavalli, the point on Lake Albert where Stanley met Emin, in fifty days by steamer up the Nile, including portage around the cataracts. At the same time people at home were reading from Stanley that the new Semliki River |