them which filled the good man’s heart, as he prayed and sung under the shelter of the old English mansion-house.  Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story trim, white-painted, “genteel” houses, which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded close up to the street, instead of standing back from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses.  Their little front-yards were very commonly full of lilac and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed to smother the lower story almost to the exclusion of light and airy so that, what with small windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness made by these choking growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be found anywhere among the abodes of the living.  Their garnishing was apt to assist this impression.  Large-patterned carpets, which always look discontented in little rooms, haircloth furniture, black and shiny as beetles’ wing cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,—­these things were inevitable.  In set piles round the lamp was ranged the current literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound numbers of one of the Unknown Public’s Magazines with worn-out steel engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished British author whom it is unnecessary to mention, a volume of sermons, or a novel or two, or both, according to the tastes of the family, and the Good Book, which is always Itself in the cheapest and commonest company.  The father of the family with his hand in the breast of his coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a print of the Last Supper, by no means Morghen’s, or the Father of his Country, or the old General, or the Defender of the Constitution, or an unknown clergyman with an open book before him,—­these were the usual ornaments of the walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the others according to politics and other tendencies.

This intermediate class of houses, wherever one finds them in New England towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory.  They have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the farm-house.  They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature.  The mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open to the sunshine.  The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it has a good warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with the rest of the family, without fear and without reproach.  These lesser country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion.  The chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the warmest welcome.  If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first precept would be,—­The dearest fuel, plenty of it, and let half the heat go up the chimney.  If you can’t afford this, don’t try to live in a “genteel” fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest farm-house.