Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source:
https://books.google.com/books?id=GtVAAQAAMAAJ
(University of Minnesota)
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by
T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, to
and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Let me take you into an old-fashioned country house, built byarchitects of the early reign of James the First. It had all thepeculiarities--I might almost say the oddities--of that particularepoch in the building art. Chimneys innumerable had it. Heaven onlyknows what rooms they ventilated; but their name must have beenlegion. The windows were not fewer in number, and much more irregular:for the chimneys were gathered together in some sort of symmetricalarrangement, while the windows were scattered all over the variousfaces of the building, with no apparent arrangement at all. Heavenknows, also, what rooms they lighted, or were intended to light, forthey very little served the purpose, being narrow, and obstructed bythe stone mullions of the Elizabethan age. Each, too, had its label ofstone superincumbent, and projecting from the brick-work, which mightleave the period of construction somewhat doubtful--but the gablesdecided the fact.
They, too, were manifold; for although the house had been built all atonce, it seemed, nevertheless, to have been erected in detachedmasses, and joined together as best the builder could; so that therewere no less than six gables, turning north, south, east, and west,with four right angles, and flat walls between them. These gables weresurmounted--topped, as it were, by a triangular wall, somewhat higherthan the acute roof, and this wall was constructed with a row ofsteps, coped with freestone, on either side of the ascent, as if thearchitect had fancied that some man or statue would, one day oranother, have to climb up to the top of the pyramid, and take hisplace upon the crowning stone.
It was a gloomy old edifice: the bricks had become discolored; thelivery of age, yellow and gray lichen, was upon it; daws hovered roundthe chimney tops; rooks passed cawing over it, on the way to theirconventicle hard by; no swallow built under the eaves; and the trees,as if repelled by its stern, cold aspect, retreated from it on threesides, leaving it alone on its own flat ground, like a moody manamidst a gay society. On the fourth side, indeed, an avenue--that isto say, two rows of old elms--crept cautiously up to it in a windingand sinuous course, as if afraid of approaching too rapidly; and atthe distance of some five or six hundred yards, clumps of old trees,beeches, and ever-green oaks, and things of sombre foliage, dotted thepark, only enlivened by here and there a herd of deer.
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