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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some cool village, the large farm-house, with its clean-swept grassy yard, shaded by the dense and massive foliage of the sugar maple; and remember the air of order and stillness, of perpetuity and unchanging repose, that seemed to breathe over the whole place. Nothing lost, or out of order; not a picket loose in the fence, not a particle of litter in the turf yard, with its clumps of lilac-bushes growing up under the windows. Within, he will remember wide, clean rooms, where nothing ever seems to be doing or going to be done, where everything is once and forever rig- idly in place, and where all household arrangements move with the punctual ex- actness of the old clock in the corner. In the family “keeping-room,” as it is termed, he will remember the staid, respectable old book-case, with its glass doors, where Rollin’s History, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Pro- gress, and Scott’s Family Bible, stand side by side in decorous order, with multi- tudes of other books, equally solemn and respectable. There are no servants in the house, but the lady in the snowy cap, with the spectacles, who sits sewing every afternoon among her daughters, as if nothing ever had been done, or were to be done,- she and her girls, in some long-forgotten fore part of the day, “did up the work,” and for the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you would see them, it is “done up.” The old kitchen floor never seems stained or spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various cooking-utensils, never seem deranged or disordered; though three and sometimes four meals a day are got there, though the family washing and ironing is there performed, and |
