These are few works by the hand of man as receptive of impression as a house. I have seen statues dug from the ground of Italy with dismembered limbs and rust-stained torsos, older than the most venerable vault in all of Rome. I have seen paintings in the sepulchres of Egyptian kings whose richest provinces have been hid for a thousand years beneath the desert sand. They are venerable remnants, but, broken as they are, dismembered, scratched, and discolored, they have a way of defying the scythe and the hour-glass. They still wear the guise of eternal novelty, reminiscent of when the marble was fresh chiseled, and of when the paint was new, for the idea which brought them into being is as clear and unalterable as the elements. But a house is a humbler matter. Give it a generation or two of
