Line, into two parts, giving them these sectional appellations which have represented such antagonisms and made us such trouble.  Every one of these old-fashioned houses had its “North” and “South” rooms on the ground-floor, and duplicates, of the same size and name, above, divided by the massive, hollow tower, called a chimney.  A double front door, with panels, scrolled with rude carving, opened right and left into the portly building, which, in the tout ensemble, looked like a New England gentleman of the olden time, in his cocked hat, and hair done up in a queue.  These were the houses built “when George the Third was King.”  In these were born the men of the American Revolution.  They are the oldest left in the land; and, like the Revolutionary pensioners, they are fast disappearing.  In a few years, it will be said the last of them has been levelled to the ground, just as the paragraph will circulate through the newspapers that the last soldier of the War of Independence is dead.

Thus, the young generation in America, now reciting in our schools the rudimental facts of the common history of the English-speaking race, will come to the meridian of manhood at a time when the three first generations of American houses shall have been swept away.  But, travelling over a space of three centuries’ breadth, they will see, in these old English dwellings, where the New World broke off from the Old—­the houses in which the first settlers of New England were born; the churches and chapels in which they were baptised, and the school-houses in which they learned the alphabet of the great language that is to fill the earth with the speech of man’s rights and God’s glory.  One hundred millions, speaking the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton on the American continent, and as many millions more on continents more recently settled by the same race, across the ocean, and across century-seas of time, shall moor their memories to these humble dwellings of England’s hamlets, and feel how many taut and twisted liens attach them to the motherland of mighty nations.

On reckoning up the log of my first day’s walk, I found I had made full twelve miles by road and field; and was more than satisfied with such a trial of country air and exercise, and with the enjoyment of its scenery and occupations.  The next day I made a longer distance still, from Coggeshall to Great Bardfield, or about eighteen miles; and felt at the end that I had established a reasonable claim to convalescence.  The country on the way was marked by the quiet and happy features of diversified plenty.  The green and gold of pastures, meadows, and wheat-fields; the picturesque interspersion of cottages, gardens, stately mansions, parks and lawns, all enlivened by a well-proportioned number of mottled cows feeding or lying along the brook-banks, and sheep grazing on the uplands,—­all these elements of rural life and scenery were blended with that fortuitous felicity which makes the charm of Nature’s country pictures.