often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less
pleasing kind of rustic architecture. A little back from the road,
seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two
stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet
of the ground. This, like the "mansion-house," is copied from an old
English pattern. Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for
instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their roofs
acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they sprung.
The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air
and rain to a quiet dove or slate color. An old broken millstone at the
door,--a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens, which the
shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping
eye,--a single large elm a little at one side,--a barn twice as big as
the house,--a cattle-yard, with

"The white horns tossing above the wall,"--

some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round them,--a
row of beehives,--a garden-patch, with roots, and currant-bushes, and
many-hued hollyhocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed, seedling onions,
and marigolds and flower-de-luces, and lady's-delights, and peonies,
crowding in together, with southernwood in the borders, and woodbine and
hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,--these were the
features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house,
when they had grown to be men. Such are the recollections that come over
poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their
vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images
that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as
they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush of the
red wave out of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from the green