house,--they are settled,--and everything is wound up and set going to
run another year. We do these things differently in the country. We
don't build a house by way of experiment and live in it a few years,
then tear it down and build another. We live in a house till it cracks,
and then we plaster it over; then it totters, and we prop it up; then
it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then
it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,--but keep living in it all
the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just
such a rickety-rackety old farmhouse, where you have clung and grown
like a fungus ever since there was anything to grow,--where your life
and luggage have crept into all the crevices and corners, and every
wall is festooned with associations thicker than the cobwebs, though
the cobwebs are pretty thick,--where the furniture and the pictures and
the knick-knacks are so become a part and parcel of the house, so grown
with it and into it, that you do not know they are chiefly rubbish till
you begin to move them and they fall to pieces, and don't know it then,
but persist in packing them up and carrying them away for the sake of
auld lang syne, till, set up again in your new abode, you suddenly find
that their sacredness is gone, their dignity has degraded into
dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only
comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has
suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and
the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this
tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the _debris_ of many
generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary
new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough
for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great
crack in my life. On the farther side are prosperity, science,
literature, philosophy, religion, society, all the refinements, and
amenities, and benevolences, and purities of life,--in short, all the