AN OLD HOMESTEAD..
[Fnom OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.] The Narrows, :Long island.
AUTUMN, who in this country always goes robed in mellow splendour, rarely fails to litre me away from town, and this year he got me into an old country house, which, because it is pleasant in my eyes, and has respectability, and almost dignity, without pretention, I shall try to put, with the people and the life in it, before my readers ; for I think that I can do so without violating the laws of hospitality. I have already described two country houses in these columns—one a banker's villa on the Hudson River, the other a farm-house in Monmouth County, New Jersey ; but this example differs from both of those as they differed from each other. My present subject was suggested to me the other day while in the library. Here I lit upen two London reviews about thirty years old, in which Mrs. Trollope and Captain Marryatt were severely handled for their books upon America ;- the judgment on the former of whom was brought to an end in the decision that her book is "time caricature of a corner" of the country ; while that on the latter was like unto it—that "a larger and more advantageous experience of American society than that of inns and steamboats might have corrected his impressions." Only a few days before, at the end of a charming letter from an English lady, which the mistress of this house has just allowed me to read, I had found this sentence :—" I have given Captain — a letter of introduction to you. He will pass through New York as he goes home on furlough. I hope you will like him ; I know he will like you ; I particularly wish him to visit your house, because it is so very rarely that an Englishman sees the home life of a real American family." Now, the woman who says this is an Englishwoman of intelligence, culture, and birth, who has lived in this country fifteen years, and recently left it for Canada. It did not take her all of her fifteen years' although I am pretty sure that it did take her one or two of them, to discover that of those who are called " Americans " there are some who are not, and some who are, the product of " American " institutions ; and that the former are the loose surface, and the latter the firm and poising centre of " American " society. They are so now ; how long they will continue so is a question which I may consider on some other occasion.
It is only nine miles from here to New York, but the surround- ings are all those of purely rural life. Small farms of from 50 to 250 acres cover the country on every side. Scattered among these are a few villas belonging to merchants and professional men, who go daily to their countinghouses and offices in the city. This place is rather of the latter than of the former class, although it is a farm, and it dates from a time when villas—the thing, if not the word—were almost unknown among us. Its previous owner, the uncle of its present master, was a highly cultivated merchant, who, although a thorough-bred Yankee, was content to live here upon a moderate fortune, dividing his time between the supervision of the farm and the study of literature and art, and who was yet one of the first and most energetic promoters of the Atlantic Telegraph. His widow is one of this family circle, in which she is treated with a deference not less than that shown to any dowager duchess in Europe ; and the shadow of her mother, a stately, high-browed, dame, whose dower bought time place, has hardly passed from the threshold across which she was borne a few years ago never to return. The house is not peculiar in this respect. Most of the farms about here for many miles are held by men whose families have owned the land for two hundred years, and in not a few of the houses are the representatives of three, and in some of four, generations ;—facts, these, it seems to me, worthy of consideration by those who have been in the habit of regarding short life and indifference to home associations and family ties as characteristic of the "American." How long this condition of things will continue I cannot under- take to say, for the great city begins to thrust its long arms and money-weighted hands this way. Most of the new comers are English and Irish merchants—very pleasant, intelligent, kindly men, though somewhat hard-headed, whose notion of improvement seems to be the dividing of the land up into building sites, and the sale of these for the improvement of their pockets. Already a horse railway, which cuts through this place, has straightened and levelled the gently winding, undulating road which led me hither in my boyhood through fruitful orchards and fat meadows. From this road the approach to the house is by a lane a little more than a quarter of a mile in length. On one side of this lane is a moss-grown stone wall much dilapidated, but over the ruins of which there is now a splendid pall of Michaelmas daisy and golden-rod. On the other, the barrier is a hedge of the honey-locust, formidable with thorns which are six, and even nine inches long, and strong enough for arrow-heads. This hedge has grown into a row of stout trees twenty-five feet high, which stretch their feathery foliage and branches across the lane, and roof it with quivering green. As we approach the house we find the old mossy fences, originally well built, much broken ;
for a few years ago the neighbourhood was desolated by pestilence— 1 see them learning Greek from their great-grandfather's books,
yellow fever, to which the previous owner fell a victim ; and then came the war, which hindered husbandry. The house stands out in relief against a background of trees and thick shrubbery— elms, walnuts, larches, spruces, and locusts. Trees are planted much closer to houses here than in England, for the shelter that they give from the fierce blasts of winter and the fiercer heat of summer. The garden is formal, the lawn only of four or five acres, and in the former are box clumps that rival those which excited Montaigne's admiration in Italy, some of them being full five feet in diameter. The very vines are huge and venerable. I measured one, a creeper, which three feet above the ground was two feet six inches in circumference. The main part of the house is of stone, the two wings are of brick. The roof projects over the windows of the second storey, and is sustained by two slender pillars and forms a high broad porch—or "piazza," as it is called here—the full frontage of the house, an indispensable adjunct to a house in this country to those who would not sit indoors during all our summer. Through the main building runs a wide hall which is furnished, something like a room, with old mahogany, dark in colour and quaint in fashion. The walls are well covered with portraits and other pictures ; and of these there seems to be great store in the house, for the walla of the drawing-room, which occupies one wing, are thickly hung with them, and they find places in the bed-rooms. The drawing-room, or west parlour, as they call it here, is little used, even when there are guests ; for I have noticed that everybody in the house gravitates across the hall toward the library, a room about eighteen feet by sixteen, and ten feet high, filled on every side, from floor to ceiling, with books, which stand in black walnut cases, without doors, open to all comers. There is not a pirated bOok upon the shelves. This room fronts the south, and its dark wood and dark blue hangings and chair-covers are kept cheerful by the sunlight all through the winter. The walls of the main building are two feet thick, and of solid masonry ; for this was built two hundred years and more ago, as a block-house for protection against Indians. The Indians, many of them, mouldered long ago into the earth which the gardener is turning with his spade yonder ; for that was an ancient burial-place of theirs, and the fort has been turned into a dwelling place for the descendants of their destroyers. The place is marked by nature as one to be fortified ; and here at the narrowest part of the narrow throat, through which passes most of the commerce of this continent, is a system of forts not yet quite completed which, it seems, would effectually check the passage of any fleet, even of ironclads. The house stands quite close to the shore, and about a mile below, in full sight, is Fort Laffayette, within whose sombre, water-girdled walls State prisoners lived luxuriously during the rebellion. This in bygone days, when the uniform of the United States was a passport into any society,—which, Jam sorry to say, it is not now,—brought many officers as welcome guests to within these doors ; and here General Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson have been entertained, little thinking, perhaps, that the time was coming when they and their entertainers would be mortal enemies.
One of the greatest charms of the place is the view seaward, and the ever moving life upon the water. Every vessel that goes and comes between New York and Europe and the East passes directly under our eyes. Here the Great Eastern stopped for hours on her last trip homeward, as if to entice a few more passengers into her almost empty cabins ; and directly before this house the huge Dunderbery made her trials of speed in running a measured mile, as if to receive encouragement and reward from the waving handkerchiefs of these ladies. There comes one of them, the mistress of the household, and with her a housemaid. The maid is English, a Liverpool lass, and the mistress a Yankee ; and yet it is the former who is Rile and thin, and the latter who has the rounded outlines and the rich tint of health. She is fair-haired and dark-eyed, with brilliant teeth and a glow in her cheek, looking like the sister of her two big boys, who are just entering the awkwardest age through which boys have to pass to manhood. She has a speak- ing voice that might have charmed Shakespeare, and the recent change in the length of skirts enables me to say, a foot and ankle worthy of being sung by Suckling or by Lovelace. The boys may be seen any day after their tutor has done with them roughly dressed, rowing, fishing, working in the garden, or play- ing with an enormous bloodhound, who lays aside all his dignity in their company. These fellows are very good, I think, to sub- mit to have Greek and Latin ground into them by a tutor whom the elder of them alone could thrash soundly, while there are boats, and fish, and birds, and rats, and dogs all waiting for them.
and manners from his copy of Lord Chesterfield's volumes, which bear the names of the intervening generations ; but I fear that neither of them will be so thorough a scholar or so courtly a gentle- man as he was ; for I can remember him, and instead of learning from Chesterfield he could have put my lord to school. We Yankees have sadly deteriorated in our scholarship, and especially in our breeding. The whirl of the world has unsettled us from the old foundations. It has done this in more respects than one ; for I observe that there is little churchgoing here, although two churches are hard by. I am inclined to think that my friends shun sermons which, as the baptismal service enjoins, they were frequently caused to hear in youth ; so that, as the old Puritan divine, Calamy, said in a prayer before a sermon which he delivered in London in Cromwell's time, by hearing many sermons they have become sermon-proof. But in the library on Sunday there is a kind of lay preaching of the Sermon on the Mount. As to the rest of the Bible, the teaching, in spite of the full-bottomed wig and canonicals of one of the portraits in the hall, is, I fear, hardly such as would be approved by the Pan-Anglican Synod in full conclave.
I find that I must bring my letter to a close, unsatisfactory to me, and I fear so to my readers. I have not told either all or exactly what I undertook to tell, perhaps because it is not tellable. Something like this, however, has happened before to my betters. Amphora ccepit institui, cur zircons exit? Do not suppose that the people I have been telling you about are persons of wealth or of much consequence. The expenditure of this household, inclusive of what comes from the place, and what is spent on it, would be covered by 1,000/. sterling, and would have been at any time these fifty years. And as to influence, Pat Farrelly, who keeps the grog-shop off on the horse railway, has more influence, and could command more votes for any place, from constable to Pre- sident, than the master of this house, ten times over.
A YANKEE.
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