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You have seen the palaces, and the marble and elegant brown-stone front houses of the rich, and large, tight, handsome farm-houses, and gentlemen's cottages in city and country, but have you ever seen one of our moral poor-houses, where the paupers live? Here then is one. It is THE POOR-HOUSE of CRAMPTON, a New England town, of three or four thousand inhabitants, an old ruined edifice, having an antique but not an attractive or original model, as it is simply a low one story house with a high, sharp roof. It represents peculiarities common to many an old house. It has been painted, and painted red, perhaps twice or three times painted; but this was a long time ago, and indeed it was a long time ago that any mere casual observer would notice it had ever been thus treated and protected. Once it was a snug, tight, warm, dry dwelling house, full of busy, happy children, the home of some souls now gone to their rest. But it is now an open, cold, decayed affair, shaking and rattling in the winds, and has served as a shelter for swine and cattle, a home of bats, mice, fowls. The shingles are decayed, some are all gone, others very loose, and mould-covered. The wind and storms easily displace them, so that of course the roof is no longer water-tight and rain-proof, and the apartments it covers are seldom otherwise than wet, or damp all round when it rains or the snows melt. But in this case it sometimes happens, as it not unfrequently does in leaky houses, that in one rain, this part of a room drips water, and in another that. Thus the furniture in these rooms acquired a great facility of locomotion, the chairs and beds where these necessary articles of domestic life abounded, moving here and there according to the exigences of the case, with little difficulty in worn and well-smoothed grooves. Good doors, tight clapboards, sound windows once belonged to the house, but now the doors are old and warped, hanging out of true, flaky, creaking on their hinges, swinging over decayed, loose or absent thresholds. The clapboards here and there drop an end for want of a nail. The windows show many a broken pane, many a place filled with rags and papers, or perchance an old weather-beaten hat. The old, ruined, wide-picket fence in front, racked this way and that, the posts being eaten off, and the upper portion settled down into their soft, decayed parts, and wrapt around by the heaving earth and the rank grass and vines, one bracing this and another that way, contrives, nobody ever knew how a fence like this could do so, to hold up against every sort of gale, year in and year out. So the old chimney stands, though now and then an ancient-looking, blackened brick, that has been poising long on the edge of the crumbling pile, falls with a startling sound on the old roof, and half slides off to the ground.

The interior of this house has, it is true, the advantage of the outside covering, be the same more or less, but then there are not wanting disadvantages of its own, that may be fairly said to compensate for that superiority.

The apartments immediately under the roof, for example, are low, damp, as we have said, the ceiling grimy, cracked, or fallen; the walls untidy, heavy lines of discoloration sweep over them in all directions; modern white-washing they "ignore," as we use a term; and paper-hangings, alias wall-paper, well moistened with gum-solvents or paste, have no affinity or adhesiveness for walls already too moist from outside causes. All sorts of ugly pictures, therefore, such as grim, horrid faces of giants; distant and uncertain landscapes; monsters of the animal creation; dark and foreboding storm clouds; yawning chasms, and far-extending, crooked and lawless rivers, paint themselves on the walls before you. The floors creak under your tread, and are full of yawning seams, and these are choked with filth seldom thoroughly brushed away. These rooms, almost never washed and scoured, old, decayed, and rat-eaten, are musty with age and bad use. The rooms, moreover, boast not of solid partitions; but the apartments are separated one from the other by boards poorly matched, or gaping wide, and so with hingeless doors, are as unsafe hiding-places of secret things, as uncomfortable retirements of innocence for sleep, meditation, prayer, or of fatigue for rest, of sickness for quiet, of old age for death. Thus uninviting are the three old chambers under the roof of the poor-house, the most direct way to which is by a very rickety, worn, unsafe flight of stairs, with here and there a step partly or entirely missing. And in these so-called rooms, the furniture, if of varied style, is of little varied value. Here is a crazy nine-penny chair, and there an antiquated, long-out-of-date bedstead, the worse for wear, but wearing little worse by longer use, rough, creaking, dangerous. A greasy, worn sack of straw partially conceals its knotty cord, that makes no promise safely to bear one through the night. Tattered and foul bedding, and sparse at that, lies twisted together there; happy he who feels no need of seeing it unwound. In one apartment, an appearance of a chest meets the eye; in another, a poor, miserably cheap table; a piece of mirror rests on the window sash, and a comb with two or three generations of hair combings and aggregations of all sorts, even nameless aggregations; and broken, brown, glazed earthen ware, of short supply -- these make up the furniture -- these are all, or so nearly all, that it is not worth the time nor ink to write the balance. Carpets? None whatever. Rockers, soft and easy? None. Lounges? No. Paintings and statuettes? All wanting. Rosewood, mahogany, cherry, even stained bureaux? They are not here. Nor are there downy beds, with full, luxuriant pillow, and sheets of purest white, curtains and mirrors, and "balm of a thousand flowers," and costly apparatus for queenly toilette. No! no! no! These are in queen's houses, and in the courts and halls of the great. There is nothing here of beauty, taste or convenience; nothing beyond the simplest calls of necessity. That is the law of these rooms. A dollar would buy all we have shown you. No auctioneer would strike them down but on a special commission.