squares laid flat over them for the window-frame

and it would also be easy to make tiles for this express purpose, which should be better and handsomer than these. The bricks or tiles for these cills should be set in the best Roman or Portland cement, and they should also be made with a much deeper splay than is usual in stone cills.

Cills are sometimes made of brick, of the same shape as a stone cill, and covered with cement to imitate stone, but these are by no means to be recommended.

Thresholds should be of hard stone. An oak

E

door-cill is sometimes used for outer doors.

There is some advantage, and also disadvantage, in this. The door can be made to fit much closer, but it is inconvenient to persons going in and out, the cill rising above the level of the entrance. Perhaps the best way of arranging the threshold, when a wooden cill is used, is to make the door to open outwards, and to make the passage inside the house level with the upper side of the cill, and the threshold and door-step level with the under side. This nearly avoids the inconvenience of having a cill rising above the floor. This cill should be either jointed to the threshold with an iron or zinc bar, half or three-quarters of an inch wide, by three-sixteenths thick, let into both the cil and the threshold (as shown in section in the margin), and bedded into both cill and threshold with white paint; or, what I believe to be equally good and less costly, the cill should be bedded on a piece of asphalted felt soaked in gas-tar, for the purpose of preventing air or moisture

THRESHOLD

from finding its way under the cill. All windowframes ought also to be fitted on to the stone or brick window-cill in a like manner.

Door-frames and casings are usually secured to wood bricks, built into the wall like a common brick; but these are rather apt in time to shrink and to get loose, especially in a half-brick inner wall. I believe that it is a better plan to use, in the place of these, pieces of wood only just the thickness of a joint of mortar, and longer than a brick they are not so liable to get loose as a wood brick.

Windows are made to open in a great variety of ways, but the two best are certainly the sashwindow and the window with upright divisions, in which one of the lights slides sideways. On the whole I prefer this to any other, as being the simplest. There is one very simple way of fitting a sash window, which I have used with success, making the top sash the weight to balance the lower one; the sash-cord is attached, one end to the top sash and the other end to the bottom

sash, passing over a sheave at the top of the frame, so that when the bottom sash is raised the top sash comes down. The bottom sash should be a little heavier than the top one. As the sheave and the sash-cord are in sight, it hardly can go wrong: the sash-cord may get a little slack, but if it be made fast, as it ought to be, to the upper side of the bottom sash, it can at any time easily be made tight. For this purpose it is rove through a brass eye at the corner of the sash, and then fastened with a couple of tacks or otherwise to the upper edge of the sash.

The

On the whole, however, I prefer the sliding casement to any other for a cottage window. sliding light is made with a groove at the bottom, and with a strip of wood fixed on to the cill of the window-frame, fitting the groove, on which the light slides backwards and forwards. The chief objection to this kind of window is that the wet accumulates in the groove, and swells the strip of wood on which the light slides, and sometimes makes it difficult to open and shut the

window.* I have found the following substitute for the strip of wood answer well. Two small brass runners are attached to the under side of the sliding light, and this is kept in its place by means of an iron bar across the windowframe, outside of the sliding light, and a few inches from the bottom of it. I think that a better plan still would be to make the light run upon runners on an iron bar fixed across the window-frame, just above the middle of the light; but I have not tried this.

Doors are usually made, the outer ones fourpanelled, the inner ones either light four-panelled or more commonly ledged: there are also a few other ways of constructing boarded doors, besides ledged doors, but they are none of them equal in lightness and strength to a panelled door.

The floor over the kitchen is sometimes ceiled in the ordinary way with lath and plaster, and

* This inconvenience is very nearly, if not entirely, obviated by adjusting the sliding light, so that it rides upon the top of the strip of wood, instead of sliding, as it usually is made to do, upon the window-frame itself.