There is not very much to say about the dining-room.  It was not specially interesting, though the sea was in sight from one of the windows.  There were some old Dutch pictures on the wall, so dark that one could scarcely make out what they were meant to represent, and one or two engravings.  There was a huge sideboard, for which Kate had brought down from Boston Miss Brandon’s own silver which had stood there for so many years, and looked so much more at home and in place than any other possibly could have looked, and Kate also found in the closet the three great decanters with silver labels chained round their necks, which had always been the companions of the tea-service in her aunt’s lifetime.  From the little closets in the sideboard there came a most significant odor of cake and wine whenever one opened the doors.  We used Miss Brandon’s beautiful old blue India china which she had given to Kate, and which had been carefully packed all winter.  Kate sat at the head and I at the foot of the round table, and I must confess that we were apt to have either a feast or a famine, for at first we often forgot to provide our dinners.  If this were the case Maggie was sure to serve us with most derisive elegance, and make us wait for as much ceremony as she thought necessary for one of Mrs. Lancaster’s dinner-parties.

The west parlor was our favorite room down stairs.  It had a great fireplace framed in blue and white Dutch tiles which ingeniously and instructively represented the careers of the good and the bad man; the starting-place of each being a very singular cradle in the centre at the top.  The last two of the series are very high art:  a great coffin stands in the foreground of each, and the virtuous man is being led off by two disagreeable-looking angels, while the wicked one is hastening from an indescribable but unpleasant assemblage of claws and horns and eyes which is rapidly advancing from the distance, open-mouthed, and bringing a chain with it.

There was a large cabinet holding all the small curiosities and knick-knacks there seemed to be no other place for,—­odd china figures and cups and vases, unaccountable Chinese carvings and exquisite corals and sea-shells, minerals and Swiss wood-work, and articles of vertu from the South Seas.  Underneath were stored boxes of letters and old magazines; for this was one of the houses where nothing seems to have been thrown away.  In one parting we found a parcel of old manuscript sermons, the existence of which was a mystery, until Kate remembered there had been a gifted son of the house who entered the ministry and soon died.  The windows had each a pane of stained glass, and on the wide sills we used to put our immense bouquets of field-flowers.  There was one place which I liked and sat in more than any other.  The chimney filled nearly the whole side of the room, all but this little corner, where there was just room for a very comfortable high-backed cushioned chair,