If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,--The dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney.

If you can't afford this, don't try to live in a "genteel" fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest farm-house.
There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland.
The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of rustic architecture.

A little back from the road, seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of the ground.

This, like the "mansion-house," is copied from an old English pattern.

Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they sprung.