Colonial Architecture.

England. How much farther its influence extended no man can say. It would be well if our cotemporary practitioners would study and sometimes follow it.
There is something almost pathetic in the first attempts at ornamentation of the earlier colonial houses, something suggestive of the way in which a child of poverty pins a bit of gay ribbon or accidentally found ornament to her coarse attire; and again, as the first delightful dawning of intelligence in the form that holds a human soul appears in the smiling face of the child, so the first manifestation of an artistic spirit in the building of the home appears on the most conspicuous feature of its countenance. Long before there was any thought of changing the former construction of the plain, rectangular house, long before fashion had set the downward pace in the shaping of the roofs, both the front door and the window over the door, if the house was two stories in height, were modestly or otherwise decorated by some feature, the details of which were originally designed by architects whose tools "are rust, whose bodies dust, whose souls are with the saints, we trust." Sometimes it was a shelter-

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