Those who remain constantly at home do not feel the deficiency so particularly, but to those who go abroad these defects are so glaring that one notices them at every turn. The more we beautify our country the better it will please ourselves, and likewise will be the means of inducing capitalists from abroad to invest among us. We may often see, in driving along our roads, first-class capacious barns and sheds, and every fence on a farm neat and tidy, gates all right, nicely painted, and the whole get-up of the farm neat and thrifty. At the same time this farmer may be living in an ordinary farm-house, or perhaps the original log-house which he built when he commenced to subdue the forest. The farmer is among our best citizens, and presents a striking contrast to our American cousin, who builds a showy house first, and perhaps a very small barn afterwards. This farmer has carved his fortune from his forest and farm, and appreciates that his stock makes money for him, hence he prepares first-class stabling for them, while his own family lives in meagre quarters within square log walls. No doubt his family are quite comfortable in their log-house, but do not essay to cut so great a figure in the world as many of his neighbors of much smaller means and fewer acres. Many times this person will own his 200 or 300 acres, and all paid for. He drives great fat horses on the road, and pulls his cap squarely down on his head, and goes on as if he meant business, which he really does. It is a matter of indifference to him if his wife and daughters be dressed in the latest fashions or not. If they have good, strong, serviceable clothing, he considers it sufficient, and the gimps and gew-gaws of modern times have not yet entered upon his calculations; but he can show a whole row of stalls in his cow-barn containing twenty head of good fat cattle and a lot of growing young calves. Such citizens are desirable, and we are proud of their industry and success. Now and again such farmers get around to the house business, and when they do build, they build well--usually brick, or it may be he has for years been gathering the stones in piles from his fields; if so, his house will be of solid stone walls two feet thick. Many such persons put $3,000 or $4,000 in their houses, and the abrupt transfer from the old log-house to the palatial residence is almost startling to the inmates. Some little time has to elapse before they sit their new house well. But, gradually, furniture comes in furtively in the great farm waggon, returning home from the market, and in a year or so their new homestead is complete in its appointments and in detail, and there is a house any man in America or in Europe might be proud of. The old log-house, likely as not, is left standing behind the new one. As an excuse for leaving the old log-house standing, he says it is handy to put implements in and a good place--up-stairs--for seed corn. But in many instances I suspect he leaves it that he may look upon it and upon the new one likewise in the same glance, and call a justifiable pride to his mind, that the new palace, comparatively speaking, grew from the old log-house, now holding his seed corn and implements. You call on him, and he passes by the old log-house without a remark, but you speak of it, and with just a tinge of pride he tells you, as he pulls down his cap and thrusts his hands in his trousers’ pockets, that on that site where the old log-house now stands, forty-five years or so ago, he cut down four maple trees to make room for it, for there was then no room elsewhere for it on his lot.