[CHAPTER XVI.]
THE POGANUC PARSONAGE.
The parsonage was a wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a succession of after-thoughts. It was at first a model New England house, built around a great brick chimney, which ran up like a light-house in the center of the square roof. Then came, in course of time, a side-wing which had another chimney and another suite of rooms. A kitchen grew out on another side, and out of the kitchen a sink-room; and out of the sink-room a wood-house, and out of the wood-house a carriage-house, and so on with a gradually lessening succession of out-buildings.
New England houses have been said by a shrewd observer to be constructed on the model of a telescope; compartment after compartment, lessening in size, and all under one cover.
But in the climate where the business of one half of the year is to provide fuel for the other half, such a style of domestic architecture becomes convenient. During the long winter months everything was under cover, giving grand scope for the children to play.
When the boys were graciously disposed to Dolly, she had a deal of good fun with them in the long range of the divers sheds. They made themselves houses, castles and fortresses in the wood-pile, and played at giving parties and entertainments, at which Spring and the cat also assisted in silent and subsidiary parts.
Sometimes they held town-meetings or voting-days, in which the Democrats got their dues in speeches that might have struck terror to their souls had they heard them. At other times they held religious meetings, and sung hymns and preached, on which occasions Dolly had been known to fall to exhorting with a degree of fervor and a fluency in reciting texts of Scripture which for the time produced quite an effect on her auditors, and led Nabby, who listened behind the door, to say to Mrs. Cushing that 'that air child was smarter than was good for her; that she'd either die young or else come to suthin' one of these days'—a proposition as to which there could not rationally be any difference of opinion.