But I have been gossiping too long—­and yet not too long if I have impressed upon the reader an idea of what a rusty, delightful old town it was to which I had come to spend the next three or four years of my boyhood.

A drive of twenty minutes from the station brought us to the door-step of Grandfather Nutter’s house.  What kind of house it was, and what sort of people lived in it, shall be told in another chapter.

Chapter Five—­The Nutter House and the Nutter Family

The Nutter House—­all the more prominent dwellings in Rivermouth are named after somebody; for instance, there is the Walford House, the Venner House, the Trefethen House, etc., though it by no means follows that they are inhabited by the people whose names they bear—­the Nutter House, to resume, has been in our family nearly a hundred years, and is an honor to the builder (an ancestor of ours, I believe), supposing durability to be a merit.  If our ancestor was a carpenter, he knew his trade.  I wish I knew mine as well.  Such timber and such workmanship don’t often come together in houses built nowadays.

Imagine a low-studded structure, with a wide hall running through the middle.  At your right band, as you enter, stands a tall black mahogany clock, looking like an Egyptian mummy set up on end.  On each side of the hall are doors (whose knobs, it must be confessed, do not turn very easily), opening into large rooms wainscoted and rich in wood-carvings about the mantel-pieces and cornices.  The walls are covered with pictured paper, representing landscapes and sea-views.  In the parlor, for example, this enlivening figure is repeated all over the room.  A group of English peasants, wearing Italian hats, are dancing on a lawn that abruptly resolves itself into a sea-beach, upon which stands a flabby fisherman (nationality unknown), quietly hauling in what appears to be a small whale, and totally regardless of the dreadful naval combat going on just beyond the end of his fishing-rod.  On the other side of the ships is the main-land again, with the same peasants dancing.  Our ancestors were very worthy people, but their wall-papers were abominable.

There are neither grates nor stoves in these quaint chambers, but splendid open chimney-places, with room enough for the corpulent back-log to turn over comfortably on the polished andirons.  A wide staircase leads from the hall to the second story, which is arranged much like the first.  Over this is the garret.  I needn’t tell a New England boy what—­a museum of curiosities is the garret of a well-regulated New England house of fifty or sixty years’ standing.  Here meet together, as if by some preconcerted arrangement, all the broken-down chairs of the household, all the spavined tables, all the seedy hats, all the intoxicated-looking boots, all the split walking-sticks that have retired from business, “weary with the march of life.”  The pots, the pans, the trunks, the bottles—­who may hope to make an inventory of the numberless odds and ends collected in this bewildering lumber-room?  But what a place it is to sit of an afternoon with the rain pattering on the roof!  What a place in which to read Gulliver’s Travels, or the famous adventures of Rinaldo Rinaldini!