of carrot and
parsnip consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your
great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean girth,
three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it
covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed oak nor
insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its
Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or
"mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street, also,
the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly
congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a
house in Elm Street. A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square,
with dormer windows projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with
turned posts round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its
door, as its owner shows a respectable expanse of a clean shirt-front.
It has a lateral margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master
wears his white wrist bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs. It may not
have what can properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at
any rate. Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for
want of any linen to show. The mansion-house which has had to "button
itself up tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin," will be
advertising for boarders presently. The old English pattern of the New
England mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas
Abney's place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family,
and wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into consciousness in
our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between the
moments of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over us
when we can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears to the hot,
aching eyes beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy calm
with them which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed and sung under
the shelter of the old English mansion-house. Next to the
mansion-houses, came the two-story trim, white-painted, "genteel" houses,
which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the
street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the
mansion-houses. Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac
and syringa and other bushes, which were al