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.