60 



were drawn over it to cover it, and looks marvellously 

 comfortable smothered in storm as they must have been 

 in those days, and away from neighbors. Like an ark, 

 it shelters from winds and weather. They are the only 

 tender memorials of the first primitive time we have. 

 There are no graves. Whenever I see one of these 

 houses I am carried back two hundred years in a twink- 

 ling, transported out of this present and landed in the 

 dim past. Can anything else do it for us here ? does any- 

 thing else ? 



Walking the other day in North Andover, I was de- 

 lighted with the design of a chimney. In that house 

 the inmates were scalped by the Indians. An architect 

 had stopped the previous season to sketch it. Richly 

 clustered it was like a bit of gothic times. 



A hundred years passed, the colonists were rich. Or- 

 nateness came and social charm. The houses were still 

 flat on the ground, and the lawn came in at the window. 

 There was much dignity preserved and breadth to the 

 end of the century, and then character passed out. Houses 

 were perked on underpinnings and no sense of design 

 left. They were comfortable, but not architectural. The 

 time of the Hancock house and Pickman house, in this 

 town, was the first ornate period and the best. It seems 

 to me there have never been houses here possessing more 

 quiet dignity, and charm. They were fifty feet away 

 from the street. A rich scroll ornamented the ample 

 doorway, and often a leaden image between. How this 

 fascinated the boys ! The massive knocker did away with 

 the vulgar tintinabulation of bells. 



The pineapple house on Brown street was my boj^ish 

 landmark, and how sweet and tender that house still is, 

 put by in a side street. In 1810 the houses were ten feet 

 from the street, and one approached them by flaring stone 



