8 VHE CUUSINS.

still loves better than any other place in the
world, and nothing pleases her more than to sit
down of an evening, and talk over with some
friend all its delights. Mary lives now with her
Uncle ard Aunt Lovett in New York, and she
always begins her description of her childhood’s
home by saying that the house was not at all like
New-York houses. ‘It was not built,” she says,
“of brick or stone, but of wood.” She calls the
houses in New-York one-sided, because they have
rooms, generally, only on one side of the hall or
entrance, while her father’s house had rooms on
both sides—large rooms, and several of them, so
that it covered more than twice as much ground
as most of the houses in New-York do. There
were no marble mantle-pieces in it, she confesses,
nor shining black grates; but, then, she adds, the
fireplaces were not such little things, casting, as
she speaks, a somewhat contemptuous glance at
her uncle’s. They were wide and high, and
when a fire was needed in them, which was not
often, it was not made of little picces of black
coal, but of great logs of oak wood and sticks of
pitch pine, or, as Mary calls it, light wood, which