A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the WayBurritt, Elihu
History
A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the Way
Burritt, Elihu
Agriculture -- Great Britain; England -- Description and travel
and cattle for stabling; then were swept away, as too poor for
either man or beast. The second generation of houses made greater
pretensions to comfort, and had their day, then passed away. They
were nearly all one-story, wooden buildings, with a small apartment
on each side of a great chimney, and a little bed-roomage in the
garret for children. Then followed the large, red, New England
mansion, broadside to the road, two stories high in front, with
nearly a rood of back roof declining to within five or six feet of
the ground, and covering a great, dark kitchen, flanked on one side
by a bed-room, and on the other by the buttery. A ponderous chimney
arose out of the middle of the building, giving a fire-place of
eight feet back to the kitchen, and one of half the dimensions to
each of the other two large rooms--the _north_ and _south_. For,
like the republic they founded, its forefathers and ours divided
their dwellings by a kind of Mason and Dixon's Line, into two parts,
giving them these sectional appellations which have represented such
antagonisms and made us such trouble. Every one of these old-
fashioned houses had its "North" and "South" rooms on the ground-
floor, and duplicates, of the same size and name, above, divided by
the massive, hollow tower, called a chimney. A double front door,
with panels, scrolled with rude carving, opened right and left into
the portly building, which, in the tout ensemble, looked like a New
England gentleman of the olden time, in his cocked hat, and hair
done up in a queue. These were the houses built "when George the
Third was King." In these were born the men of the American
Revolution. They are the oldest left in the land; and, like the
Revolutionary pensioners, they are fast disappearing. In a few
years, it will be said the last of them has been levelled to the
ground, just as the paragraph will circulate through the newspapers
that the last soldier of the War of Independence is dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account