The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet dove or slate color.

An old broken millstone at the door,--a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens, which the shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,--a single large elm a little at one side,--a barn twice as big as the house,--a cattle-yard, with "The white horns tossing above the wall,"-- some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round them,--a row of beehives,--a garden-patch, with roots, and currant-bushes, and many-hued hollyhocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed, seedling onions, and marigolds and flower-de-luces, and lady's-delights, and peonies, crowding in together, with southernwood in the borders, and woodbine and hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,--these were the features by which the Rockland-born children remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men.

Such are the recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm with the after-dinner flush of the red wave out of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from the green waves of the ocean.
Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the air,--as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes with their sharp-pointed weathercocks.
The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England meeting-house.

It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs, out of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at its summit.

Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery running round three sides of the building.