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 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