1doubt whether your correspondent is correct in saying that the houses are too small, or that the barns are too large. That is a very strange fault to find with country seats generally; they are quite too often apt to differ the other way. The chief fault, I apprehend, if fault there be, is, that the relative position, of the bars is not right, as to the house. Never recommend a man to build a large house. The tendency is too much in that direction already, and where one builds too small and compact, twenty build too large and too expensive. A man who sets out to find fault with the country houses about Boston, may, no doubt, find abundant material for his occupation; but I doubt whether there is a place in the world where, taken altogether, so much good taste in the aggregate has been displayed, as in the neighborhood of that city. The land is naturally poor, wretchedly so, compared with good American land. It is rocky almost everywhere, swampy in places, and not over picturesque at the best; but there are many sweet spots, which the ingenuity of man has moulded out of the most forbidding materials.

No, No. The Puritan blood of old Massachusetts has beat the whole American world in subduing a sterile soil, and smoothing away the rugged places; and instead of finding fault with what they have done, the wonder is, that under such difficulties they have accomplished half so much as is shown in their charming retreats, their suburban houses, and beautiful grounds.

What would the Bostonians have done had they possessed the promontories on the Jersey side of the Hudson river, the pallisades, the highlands above, the grand belts of wooded, and the fine swells of open land, along the river, through Rockland and Putnam, and Orange and Dutchess, and Ulster counties, with their own spirit of improvement, and the wealth of New York to back up their suburban taste and enterprise? Or about the more level precincts of Philadelphia, even? A different sort of improvement would have been made longer ago, and in somewhat better taste, I fancy, than exists in many instances.