will rather live and starve near the old spot
than emigrate elsewhere—calculate on the
rooms being let to the poor silken fraternity;
and in this calculation they are not
disappointed. The house-tops exhibit these
windows as near the roof-ridge as is
practicable. The weaver loves flowers (praise be
to him for it), and often places them at his
window; he loves pigeons, and builds a cote
for them on the roof; he loves linnets and
other song-birds, and builds cages for them, and
thus the men, their rooms, their windows,
their flowers, their pigeons, and their birds,
form the elements of the house-top prospect
in Bethnal Green.

But there are far humbler house-tops than
these, as all who look about them a little in
the world may easily see. There is the house-
top of poverty and misery. The house-top in
Ireland and in the Hebrides is too often a
sorry substitute for a real rain-repelling, cold-
excluding covering. Eaves to the roof we
may find if we can. There is a scanty sort of
wooden roof, covered with a thatch made of
stubble or potato-stalks, bound by leather or
rope straws, which bands are fastened by
heavy stones to the top of the broad wall.
The woodwork is too slight to bear more than
a thin layer of thatch; and the rain tumbles
in a free-and-easy sort of way, until finally
excluded by the coating of soot which rises
from the turf fire beneath. Poor Paddy often
finds the rain peppering down upon him in
the middle of the night, and has to shift his
straw to a part of the cabin where the thatch
may possibly be in a little more kindly
humour. Sometimes he has not even the dignity
of a bit of thatch over his head; he has to
content himself with a layer of sods, pretty
nearly in the same state in which he dug
them up from the ground. By many degrees
better than this is the snowy covering of the
snow hut of the Laplander and the Esquimaux;
for, despite our usual prejudice in this
matter, snow is really a warm material; the
external cold finds some difficulty in insinuating
itself through a snow wall or roof; and the fur-
clad Esquimaux, with his four-feet high gentle
partner, coddle themselves up in their
beehive sort of a hut, defy the external cold, and
feast upon train-oil to their hearts' content.

Our English house-tops put on almost as
great a variety of attire as the men and
women who are roofed in thereby. Slates
reign paramount in modern London, although
their dominion is less decided in the country.
And let not the uninitiated turn up the nose
of scorn at slates; they are, in their own
peculiar technical career, princesses, duchesses,
and countesses, according to the sizes and
prices; and a slater thus mixes with the
aristocracy on terms more familiar than falls
to the lot of most artisans. Some house-tops
dress themselves in brick-coloured garments,
yclep'd tiles; and these tiles, convex at one
part of their width, and concave at another,
afford means for lapping one over another,
and for leaving channels down which rain
can descend. In some instances, the house-
top apes the terrace form of the East; and
then it requires flat quadrangular tiles, which
are cemented together very artistically. The
age of iron demands that iron should be tried
for or by the house-tops—and tried it is.
Sometimes plates of iron are lapped slightly
one over another, and made into a roof which
may be very nearly flat; sometimes
corrugated sheet-iron is made to do duty—and
wonderfully well does a small weight of iron
in this form support itself, and furnish a
shelter for all beneath it. Our iron-roofs are
bagatelles, however, to those of Russia; most
of the new buildings at Petersburg and
Moscow are now, as a precaution against fire,
roofed with sheet-iron; and this iron being
painted bright red, or bright green, displays
the vanity of the house-tops very conspicuously.
Sometimes iron gives way to a younger
brother, zinc—as being not so heavy as lead,
and not so soon corroded as iron.
Sometimes (but not much in England) wooden
roofs are adopted—and very ingeniously they
are arranged—the trunks of trees are split
down the middle, and hollowed out; one layer
of these trunks is laid down side by side,
with the concave side uppermost, and then
another layer upon these with the convex
side uppermost, covering the vacant spaces
between the trunks of the undermost layer.
Sometimes asphaltum is taken into favour
by the house-tops; it is applied either as a
liquid cement to form a terrace-roof, or is
combined with hat-manufacturers' refuse felt
to form a " flexible asphaltic roofing," to which
a very learned Greek name is applied. And
if this list of substances be not enough, we
will mention another—paper; house-tops
have, occasionally, not refused to be covered
with a paper cap. The late Mr. Loudon,
always searching for the useful, showed how
roofs might be formed of very slight rafters,
with laths or very light pine boards upon
them, and sheets of brown paper on the
laths; the sheets have previously been twice
saturated with boiling tar and pitch, and
after being nailed on like slates, they are fed
from a hot delicate dish of tar, pitch, whiting,
and charcoal, with a crowning sprinkling of
sand or ashes.

Thus do the house-tops clothe themselves,
some sternly, some daintily. But there is one
kind of garment more characteristic of a real
old English country house-top than any
other; this is the thatched roof, the garment
of reeds and straws. A thatched cottage has
afforded stanzas to scores of pretty songs,
pretty poems, aud pretty stories—the very
humility of the thoughts associated with it,
being the source of value to the poetasters.
But its merits are not to be so summarily
despatched. A thatched roof is a clever
production; Ralph the Thatcher has to show
more judgment than Teddy the Tiler, who
gives a red covering to some of our house-