traces of their earlier selves, insomuch that the building of Newark and the Oranges, beginning with a few sandstone churches too massive to be torn down and seldom dating beyond 1800, exhibits the various tendencies of domestic architecture since, from the white clapboarded Grecian temple, through the Downing and scroll-saw periods and the mansarded box, to the ultimate achievements of the cottage architecture named for Queen Anne, which would have so much surprised that sovereign. It is perhaps gratifying to reflect that an experienced actuary would still take one of the old stone houses as a more eligible "life" than any of its successors. Interspersed with these precarious monuments of the American house-carpenter's varying tastes, there are houses and other buildings constructed at different dates by educated architects. These, however, need not detain us, because it happens that there is a settlement in which the very newest phase of American rural architecture is much more completely exemplified than the oldest is exemplified anywhere, and is the more striking for being unmixed with any remains of earlier periods. Sing, Muse, of Short Hills, New Jersey; begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the strings.
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RESIDENCE, SHORT HILLS, NEW JERSEY.
A very pleasant place Short Hills must have been even before it occurred to an enterprising merchant of New York to buy it and convert it into an artistic and unique suburb,—an undulating piece of ground on the farther slope of the Orange Mountains, where they decline into the "Short Hills," with a wide southwestward outlook and fine old trees scattered about it. A still pleasanter place it is now that it has been transformed,—as everybody must agree. Pleasant, indeed, is not the precise adjective which everybody would select. The rustic Jerseyman, for example, if you ask him what kind of a place Short Hills is, will probably tell you, "Funniest place y' ever see," and he thus catches a shade of meaning that the other adjective misses, and conveys a sense of strangeness combined with entertainment which is, in fact, the impression that Short Hills makes upon a stranger. Other people have laid out
