The houses, from the highest to the lowest class, exhibited not merely comfort but luxury, yet it was a selfish sort of luxury.

The perpetually closed door and shut-up rooms of ceremony, the largest and most conspicuous of all in the house, gave an air of inhospitableness which, I should hope, was not indicative of the real character of the inhabitants.

Yet it seemed to be a deserted village, a place of the dead rather than of the living, an ornamental graveyard.

The liveliness of social beings was absent and was even inconsistent with the superlative neatness of all around us.

It was a best parlor out-of-doors, where the gayety of frolicking children would derange the set order of the furniture, or an accidental touch of a sacrilegious foot might scratch the polish of a fresh-varnished fence, or flatten down the nap of the green carpet of grass, every blade of which is trained to grow exactly so.
"The grounds and gardens of a Mr.Vander Beck were, indeed, a curiosity from the strange mixture of the useful with the ridiculously ornamental.
Here were the beautiful banks of a lake and Nature's embellishment of reeds and water plants, which, for a wonder, were left to grow in their native luxuriance, and in the midst a huge pasteboard or wooden swan, and a wooden mermaid of tasteless proportions blowing from a conchshell.