mories. Its two windows looked Southward
across the side grounds (for the hall and great parlour came not so
far back) to our house and garden. Behind the dining-room, and
separating it from the kitchen and pantry, was a passage with a back
stairway and with a bench of washing-basins, easily supplied with
water from a cistern below, and from the kettle in the adjacent
kitchen. To this place we youngsters now hastened, to put ourselves to
rights for supper. The house was carpeted throughout. The great
parlour was panelled in wood, white and gold. The other chief rooms
were wainscoted in oak; and as to their upper walls, some were bright
with French paper, while some shone white with smooth plaster; their
ceilings and borders were decorated with arabesque woodwork. There
were tiled fireplaces, with carved mantels, white, like the
rectangular window-frames and panelled doors. Well, well, 'twas but a
house like countless others, and why should I so closely describe
it?--save that I love the memory of it, and fain would linger upon its
commonest details.

Mighty snug was the dining-room that evening, with its oaken
sideboard, its prints and portraits on the wall, its sputtering fire,
and its well-filled table lighted from a candelabrum in the centre.
The sharp odour of the burning pine was keen to the nostrils, and
mingled with it was the smell of the fried ham. There was the softer
fragrance of the corn meal mush or porridge, served with milk, and
soft was the taste of it also. We had sausage cakes, too, and pancakes
to be eaten either with butter or with the syrup of the maple-tree;
and jam, and jelly, and fruit butter. These things seem homely fare,
no doubt, but there was a skill of cookery in the fat old negress,
Hannah--a skill consisting much in the plentiful use of salt and
pepper at proper stages--that would have given homelier fare a relish
to more fastidious tongues. I miss in the wholesome but limited and
unseasoned diet of the English the variety and savouriness of American
food (I mean the food of the well-to-do in the large towns), which
includes all the English and Scotch dishes, corrected of their
insipidity, besides countless dishes French, German, and Dutch, and
many native to the soil, all improved and diversified by the
surprising genius for cookery which, in so few generations, the negro
race has come to exhibit. I was a busy lad at that meal; a speechless
one, consequently, and for some minutes so eng