Maybe I am too boastful of my fireplace; but then, Franklin fire-frames are so rare, - not made at all nowadays, - and mine is a very good one. Besides, I did n't put it there; Franklin invented his fuel-saving stoves in 1742, and mine has always stood where it does now. Therefore I can be as impersonally proud of it as I like, and I am rejoiced at understanding it. The lines have an almost Attic simplicity, and its spiritual discipline has dominated my whole room. That's the real beauty of Colonial decoration properly valued. Superfluous furnishings seem a waste of ideas, and a desolation of bad taste. You observe that the whole scheme of my mantel decoration is restrained - a bust of Dante, four candlesticks, and as many silhouettes. The central candlesticks are French, and at a Paris rag-fair cost two francs. They are very old, as the disk to catch the wax-drip indicates. The others are American, and I paid two dollars for the pair at a small shop on Charles Street. My steeple-top andirons and shovel and tongs I got from my Favorite Junkman for twenty-five dollars, and, almost immediately, a dealer who had heard of them offered me, without seeing them, double the price I had paid. To-day, at an expensive city shop, I suppose they would bring a hundred. I still live in hopes of buying the completing jamb-hooks from my tall, lonely old man across the river. You can still see the places where once they were on the stately white columns, and there, too, are the markings of a pair of knobs, meant, I suppose, to hold a fan-screen and a tiny hearth-brush. These I won't replace until I can find just the blue-and-rose Battersea enamel pair which my collecting soul craves.

The small ones, under the Empire mirror, are Austrian; green and white glass set in a brass rim, and not at all expensive; only a dollar and a half they were. But they support my mirror, my "tabernacle mirror" as some English authorities would call it, quite as well as if they were more costly, and they have the satisfactory quality of harmonizing themselves with the surroundings. My mirror, too, was a bargain: just eight dollars, all done over; mahogany, with a shallow-carved cornice, minikin brass rosettes, and the slender grooving that recalls an earlier Sheraton influence. This is my Empire group: the mahogany work-table (eight dollars, too) has well-proportioned, tapering, rope-carved legs, and two small drawers with brass pulls, a very good example of early-nineteenth-century American cabinet-making; while my chair - its mate stands by the piano, you remember - was made at the same period; Daniel Webster is reputed to have had a set of them when he first went to housekeeping. Is n't that interesting? Not that these of mine were even remotely connected with his life, for I bought them at a winter sale in Vermont, at a house where they had always lived. For five dollars the pair, too! They were so excellently preserved that all they needed was rubbing down and re-upholstering, which I did myself - and made an awful mistake. Thrilled with the feeling that I was completing my parlour, I covered the slip-seats with some of my rose chintz, and, my dears, the result was appalling! Even the lovable carved rosette and the delicate supporting acanthus leaves looked muddled. So I ripped the material off, and replaced it with a thoroughly Empire fabric, inch-wide stripes of deep gray alternating with a lighter band worked in small and patterned bouquets. And now my chairs are appropriately dressed, for the striped design carries out all the rhythm of their lines. Can you see my silhouettes at all? I wish you could, for they deserve your careful attention; you must let me show them to you some time. I know nothing that so much adds to the presence of an old house, that is so eloquent of time past, as these artless little profiles. My adorable Bache lady, my two fine, gilt-touched Miers, in the old pear-wood frames, and O------'s frilled India-ink ancestor, - familiarly known as the "Blot on the Scutcheon," because he was a Loyalist, - all were given to me, just as my pictures were. The six others come to twenty-eight dollars, and only one was a real extravagance. And yet, can I call him so? A signed "silhouette coloree," not cut by machine, or "scissorgraphed," but painted with meticulous care, for only fifteen dollars. It is nothing at all! I bought it at a most exclusive shop on a most exclusive street, probably because the proprietor, as he frankly admits, knows nothing about silhouettes. (By the way, that is frequently the luck by which most poor but "knowledgeable" collectors come by their treasures!) I do want to tell you the story, for it is one of my most romantic "antiquing" episodes.

When I bought this handsome gentleman in his oval frame of repousse brass, I knew that he was Governor Arnold of Rhode Island, and that he had recently come from a Newport collection. But such insufficient knowledge failed to satisfy me; I proceeded to look him up in our College Library, with the result that I found him to be Lemuel Hastings Arnold of the Class of 1811, Dartmouth College. From the costume the profile must have been made about the time of his graduation; possibly it was the equivalent of that time for a Senior photograph. Think of it - he had come back to his Alma Mater after all these voyaging years; come back, still young, to rest in my old parlour, where, no doubt, he had often sat and talked through long, candlelit evenings about Predestination and Infant Damnation, as was the cheerful fashion of those bygone days.

Oh, I do love my square, many-doored, three-windowed parlour, perhaps all the more because it was so hard to achieve. Of course it's frightfully difficult to do twentieth-century housekeeping in an eighteenth-century cottage; but, honestly, I don't want to live anywhere else. I know, because the other night I dreamed an awful dream - a nightmare ! It appeared that I had gone away for a brief time, and the Powers That Be had nefariously given my dear house to somebody else. I came back to find my old furniture displaced, my cherished rooms full of Mission and golden oak.

As I left in wrath and indignation, my supplanter remarked sweetly: "But you'11 come and see me again, won't you?"

"What, Madam! After this desecration!" I cried. "Never!!!" (Usually I am not so Johnsonian in my phrasing; I suppose despair drove me to it.) I stalked out of the house - and I woke up crying.

Now O------, who is a bit of a Freudian, insists that my subconscious self was really dramatizing a desire to be rid of my antique cares; and when I argued the question hotly, he replied that my resistance merely proved the psychological point. But it is n't so at all. I love my Next-to-Nothing House the way I do my family; exactingly, even, at times, reprovingly, but always with an abiding affection.