Our country's minstrel! in whose crystal verse With tranquil joy we trace Her native glories, and the tale rehearse Of her primeval race,-- Blest are thy laurels, that unchallenged crown Worn brow and silver hair, For truth and manhood consecrate renown, And her pure triumph share! HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD. X. Our gallant Bob Stephens, into whose life-boat our Marianne has been received, has lately taken the mania of house-building into his head. Bob is somewhat fastidious, difficult to please, fond of domesticities and individualities; and such a man never can fit himself into a house built by another, and accordingly house-building has always been his favorite mental recreation. During all his courtship as much time was taken up in planning a future house as if he had money to build one, and all Marianne's patterns, and the backs of half their letters, were scrawled with ground-plans and elevations. But latterly this chronic disposition has been quickened into an acute form by the falling-in of some few thousands to their domestic treasury,--left as the sole residuum of a painstaking old aunt, who took it into her head to make a will in Bob's favor, leaving, among other good things, a nice little bit of land in a rural district half an hour's railroad-ride from Boston. So now ground-plans thicken, and my wife is being consulted morning, noon, and night, and I never come into the room without finding their heads close together over a paper, and hearing Bob expatiate on his favorite idea of a library. He appears to have got so far as this, that the ceiling is to be of carved oak, with ribs running to a boss overhead, and finished mediaevally with ultramarine blue and gilding,--and then away he goes sketching Gothic patterns of book-shelves which require only experienced carvers, and the wherewithal to pay them, to be the divinest things in the world. Marianne is exercised about china-closets and pantries, and about a bed-room on the ground-door,--for, like all other women of our days, she expects not to have strength enough to run up-stairs oftener than once or twice a week; and my wife, who is a native genius in this line, and has planned in her time dozens of houses for acquaintances, wherein they are at this moment living happily, goes over every day with her pencil and ruler the work of rearranging the plans, according as the ideas of the young couple veer and vary.