There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland.  The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of rustic architecture.  A little back from the road, seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of the ground.  This, like the “mansion-house,” is copied from an old English pattern.  Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they sprung.  The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet dove or slate color.  An old broken millstone at the door,—­a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens, which the shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,—­a single large elm a little at one side,—­a barn twice as big as the house,—­a cattle-yard, with

     “The white horns tossing above the wall,”—­

some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round them,—­a row of beehives,—­a garden-patch, with roots, and currant-bushes, and many-hued hollyhocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed, seedling onions, and marigolds and flower-de-luces, and lady’s-delights, and peonies, crowding in together, with southernwood in the borders, and woodbine and hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,—­these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men.  Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush of the red wave out of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from the green waves of the ocean.

Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the air,—­as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other’s glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England meeting-house.  It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs, out of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at its summit.  Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery running round three sides of the building.  On the fourth side the pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it.  Here preached the Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D. D., successor, after a number of generations,