than half a dozen houses of the kind in the whole county. The rounded, double-pitched roofs, so common in the older parts of the country, and the shingled walls, also, found so frequently on old farm-houses of Long Island, New Jersey, and the neighborhood of New York, are very rare here; probably there are not a dozen double-pitched roofs in the county, and we do not know of one building with shingled sides.
Certainly there is not much to boast of among us in the way of architecture as yet, either in town or country; but our rural buildings are only seen amid the orchards and fields of the farms, or surrounded by the trees and gardens of the villages, so that their defects are, perhaps, less striking, relieved, as they generally are, by an air of thrift and comfort, and softened by the pleasing features of the surrounding landscape.
Saturday, 18th.—Although the foliage has now entirely fallen, yet the different kinds of seeds and nuts still hanging on the naked branches give them a fuller character than belongs to the depths of winter. The catkins on the different birches thicken the spray of these trees very perceptibly; these are of two sorts, the fertile ones are more full than the sterile heads; both grow together on the same branch, but in different positions.
There are as many as six kinds of birches growing in this State: the canoe birch, the largest of all, sometimes seventy feet high, and three feet in diameter, and which grows as far south as the Catskills; the Indians make their canoes of its bark, sewing them with the fibrous roots of the white spruce. The cherry birch, or black birch, is also a northern variety, and very common here; it is used for cabinet work. Then there is the yellow birch, another northern variety, and a useful tree. The red birch, also a tree
