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 allowed to smother the lower story almost to the
exclusion of light and airy so that, what with small windows and
small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking growths of
shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were the most
tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere among
the abodes of the living. Their garnishing was apt to assist this
impression. Large-patterned carpets, which always look discontented
in little rooms, haircloth furniture, black and shiny as beetles' wing
cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called
astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,--these things
were inevitable. In set piles round the lamp was ranged the current
literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound
numbers of one of the Unknown Public's Magazines with worn-out steel
engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished
British author whom it is unnecessary to mention, a volume of sermons,
or a novel or two, or both, according to the tastes of the family, and
the Good Book, which is always Itself in the cheapest and commonest
company. The father of the family with his hand in the breast of his
coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a print
of the Last Supper, by no