burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their weary bones under
epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty
church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks; the
district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so
called in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses scattered near
and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance,
and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as
I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have
called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy:

But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape. The worst of a
modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. I watched
one building not long since. It had no proper garret, to begin with,
only a sealed interval between the roof and attics, where a spirit could
not be accommodated, unless it were flattened out like Ravel, Brother,
after the millstone had fallen on him. There was not a nook or a corner
in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part was
as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition, his
figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her)
Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through his (or her) subjects'
keyholes.

Now the old house had wainscots, behind which the mice were always
scampering and squeaking and rattling down the plaster, and enacting
family scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar where the cold
slug clung to the walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the
garish day; where the green mould loved to grow, and the long white
potato-shoots went feeling along the floor, if haply they might find the
daylight; it had great brick pillars, always in a cold sweat with holding
up the burden they had been aching under day and night far a century and