and gradations of human life and condition are adjusted; fitting a separate being, experience, and attachment to every individual heart; training its tendrils to cling all its life long to one slightly individualised locality, which another could never call home; giving itself and all its earthly hopes to an occupation which another would esteem a prison discipline; sucking the honey of contentment out of a condition which would be wormwood to another person on the same social level.

On reaching Coggeshall, I became again the guest of a Friend, who gave me the same old welcome and hospitality which I have so often received from the members of that society.  After tea, he took me about the town, and showed me those buildings so interesting to an American—­low, one-story houses, with thatched roofs, clay-colored, wavy walls, rudely-carved lintels, and iron-sash windows opening outward on hinges like doors, with squares of glass 3 inches by 4;—­ houses which were built before the keel of the Mayflower was laid, which conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock.  Here, now! see that one on the other side of the street, looking out upon a modern and strange generation through two ivy-browed eyes just lighted up to visible speculation by a single candle on the mantel-piece!  A very animated and respectable baby was carried out of that door in its mother’s arms, and baptised in the parish church, before William Shakespeare was weaned.  There is a younger house near by, which was a century old when Washington was born.  These unique, old dwellings of town, village, and hamlet in England, must ever possess an interest to the American traveller which the grand and majestic cathedrals, that fill him with so much admiration, cannot inspire.  We link the life of our nation more directly to these humbler buildings.  Our forefathers went out of these houses to the New World.  The log huts they first erected served them and their families as homes for a few years; then were given to their horses and cattle for stabling; then were swept away, as too poor for either man or beast.  The second generation of houses made greater pretensions to comfort, and had their day, then passed away.  They were nearly all one-story, wooden buildings, with a small apartment on each side of a great chimney, and a little bed-roomage in the garret for children.  Then followed the large, red, New England mansion, broadside to the road, two stories high in front, with nearly a rood of back roof declining to within five or six feet of the ground, and covering a great, dark kitchen, flanked on one side by a bed-room, and on the other by the buttery.  A ponderous chimney arose out of the middle of the building, giving a fire-place of eight feet back to the kitchen, and one of half the dimensions to each of the other two large rooms—­the north and south.  For, like the republic they founded, its forefathers and ours divided their dwellings by a kind of Mason and Dixon’s