the battle of the harvest, the girdled stacks stand on the field of
slaughter like so many ragged Niobes,--say rather like the crazy widows
and daughters of the dead soldiery.

Once more let us come back to the old house. It was far along in its
second century when the edict went forth that it must stand no longer.

The natural death of a house is very much like that of one of its human
tenants. The roof is the first part to show the distinct signs of age.
Slates and tiles loosen and at last slide off, and leave bald the boards
that supported them; shingles darken and decay, and soon the garret or
the attic lets in the rain and the snow; by and by the beams sag, the
floors warp, the walls crack, the paper peels away, the ceilings scale
off and fall, the windows are crusted with clinging dust, the doors drop
from their rusted hinges, the winds come in without knocking and howl
their cruel death-songs through the empty rooms and passages, and at last
there comes a crash, a great cloud of dust rises, and the home that had
been the shelter of generation after generation finds its grave in its
own cellar. Only the chimney remains as its monument. Slowly, little by
little, the patient solvents that find nothing too hard for their
chemistry pick out the mortar from between the bricks; at last a mighty
wind roars around it and rushes against it, and the monumental relic
crashes down among the wrecks it has long survived. So dies a human
habitation left to natural decay, all that was seen above the surface of
the soil sinking gradually below it,

Till naught remains the saddening tale to tell
Save home's last wrecks, the cellar and the well.

But if this sight is saddening, what is it to see a human dwelling fall