This friendliness of appearance was largely the emanation of the homely
and beautiful house which so greatly pleased my fancy.
It might be difficult to say why I thought it the "finest" house in
Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was
merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain,
set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a
fair spread of flat lawn. But it gave back a great deal for your glance,
just as some people do. It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked
not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in
it. Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your
horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people
living there, who would welcome you merrily.
It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and a grandmother;
where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family
reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would
return from no matter what distances; a house where big turkeys would be
on the table often; where one called "the hired man" (and named either
Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his
knees on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played
charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of
wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy
weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad
front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of
spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful--and that is about as
near as I can come to my reason for thinking it the finest house in
Wainwright.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25