The cottage should never occupy a principal, or prominent site on the farm. It should take a subordinate position of ground. This adds to its expression as subordinate in rank, among the lesser farm buildings. A cottage cannot, and should not aspire to be _chief_ in either position or character. Such should be the farm house proper; although unpretending, still, in style, above the cottage; and if the latter, in addition, be required on the farm, it should so appear, both in construction and finish; just what it is intended for--a tenement for economical purposes.
There is another kind of cottage, the dwellers in which, these pages will probably never reach, that expresses, in its wild structure, and rude locality, the idea of Moore's pretty song--
"I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled Above the green elms, that a cottage was near."
Yet, in some parts of our country, landlords may build such, for the accommodation of tenants, which they may make useful on the outskirts of their estates, and add indirectly to their own convenience and interest in so doing. This may be indulged in, _poetically_ too--for almost any thinking man has a spice of poetry in his composition--vagabondism, a strict, economizing utilitarian would call it. The name matters not. One may as well indulge his taste in this cheap sort of charitable expenditure, as another may indulge, in his dogs, and guns, his horses and equipages--and the first is far the cheapest. They, at the west and south, understand this, whose recreations are occasionally with their hounds, in chase of the deer, and the fox, and in their pursuit spend weeks of the fall and winter months, in which they are accompanied, and assisted, as boon companions for the time, by the rude tenants of the cottages we have described:
Another class of cottage may come within the farm enclosures, half poetical, and half economical, such as Milton describes:
"Hard by a cottage chimney smokes, From betwixt two aged oaks;"
and occupied by a family pensioner and his infirm old wife--we don't think _all_ "poor old folks" ought to go to the alms-house, because they cannot work _every_ day of the year--of which all long-settled families of good estate have, now and then, one near to, or upon their premises. Thousands of kind and liberal hearts among our farming and planting brethren, whose impulses are--