The main building is more than a century old.  It is built with thick brick walls, but one story in height, and surmounted by a double-faced or hipped roof, which gives the idea of a ship, bottom upwards.  Later buildings have been added to this, as the wants or ambition of the family have expanded.  These are all constructed of wood, and seem to have been built in defiance of all laws of congruity, just as convenience required....

...  Beyond the bridge, at some distance, stands a prominent object in the perspective of this picture,—­the most venerable appendage to the establishment,—­a huge barn, with an immense roof hanging almost to the ground, and thatched a foot thick with sun-burnt straw, which reaches below the eaves in ragged flakes.  It has a singularly drowsy and decrepit aspect.

* * * * *

=_291._= A DISAPPOINTED POLITICIAN.

“Things are getting worse and worse,” replied the other.  “I can see how it’s going.  Here, the first thing General Jackson did, when he came in, he wanted to have the president elected for six years; and, by and by, they will want him for ten; and now they want to cut up our orchards and meadows, whether or no.  That’s just the way Bonaparte went on.  What’s the use of states, if they are all to be cut up with canals, and railroads, and tariffs?  No, no, gentlemen; you may depend Old Virginny’s not going to let Congress carry on in her day.”

“How can they help it?” asked Sandy.

“We haven’t fout and bled,” rejoined the other, taking out of his pocket a large piece of tobacco, and cutting off a quid, as he spoke in a somewhat subdued tone,—­“we haven’t fout and bled for our liberties to have our posterity and their land circumcised after this rate, to suit the figaries of Congress.  So let them try it when they will.”

“Mr. Ned Hazard, what do you call state rights?” demanded Sandy.

“It’s a sort of a law,” said the other speaker, taking the answer to himself, “against cotton and wool.”

* * * * *

From his “Life of William Wirt.”

=_292._= WIRT’S STYLE OF ORATORY.

He became, in the maturity of his career, one of the most philosophic and accomplished lawyers of his time.  In earlier life, he was remarked for a florid imagination, and a power of vivid declamation,—­faculties which are but too apt to seduce their possessor to waste his strength in that flimsier eloquence, which more captivates the crowd without the bar, than the Judge upon the bench, and whose fatal facility often ensnares ambitious youth capable of better things, by its cheap applause and temptation to that indolence which may be indulged without loss of popularity.  The public seem to have ascribed to Mr. Wirt some such, reputation as this, when he first attracted notice.  He came upon the broader theater of his fame under this disadvantage.  He was aware of it himself,