These chairs stand facing one another, each just beside one of the little built-in closet doors. Do you like my silhouettes hanging above them? I hope so, for I do extremely; and, let me tell you, I worked for a long time before I could get just the effect I wanted. I tried pictures; and, pretty as these small gilt-framed notes of color were, they did n't please me. Next, I hung mirrors -small Constitution glasses which, good in themselves, became the space not at all. And then some luckiest chance made me send in a casual bid to a Philadelphia auction, and I got the pair for six dollars and a half apiece. I never expected to, for, see, they are marked, with meticulous fineness, "Day Fecit." You know how rare a signed silhouette is! Where were all the Pennsylvania collectors that morning, to let me buy these treasures for a fraction of their value? Besides, they are not cut, but painted in olive-green and gold, an unusual combination; and they are in their old mahogany frames, the protecting glass being decorated in black and gilt in early-nineteenth-century fashion. They are not only a pair of profiles; they are probably betrothal silhouettes, Sarah Fenton and Edward Trego, done in the long-ago month of May, 1834. And here I have separated them, like the chairs; no longer they hang side by side, as was originally intended, but opposite each other, parted by the width of a hall. Still, when I look at Sarah, I am not sure but it is for the best. She seems a "magerful" woman; certainly, at least, the dominant half of the happy couple.

My rugs are not so rare, but they are interesting, too, and fairly old, for both were made "up-t'-Etny-way" more than forty years ago - a moderately ancient age for a "drawn-in" rug. I bought them for a dollar apiece, from a most indignant old lady - indignant, be it said, because to her these rugs were so much rubbish, "old culch," already nearing their last long home on the back piazza. To take those inferior things when I might have some of her new ones, vivid with greens and reds! I remember her saying disdainfully to her daughter, who was preparing to brush them, "Ellen, I want you should let those rugs alone. Don't shake the dust out. She likes everything old."

One is an oblong, just the door-width, and a most agreeable dulled blending of blacks and faded roses and blues, worked in primitive patterns; for this old woman had the positive virtue of creating her own naive designs. The other is a circle a little more than a yard in diameter; a crocheted border, with a gay centre of formalized roses and buds worked against an ecru background. It goes most becomingly with a curtain that separates the hall from a narrow passageway, the flowered surface of the chintz always reminding me of the decoration of Kershaw valentines. Moreover, it has all the qualities of the curtains that Laura Pendennis and Charlotte bought at Shoolbred's in Tottenham Court Road, for it is "cheap and pleasant and lively to look at." Sometimes I think I'11 put some of its brightness at my narrow windows on either side of the door; but then I think I won't, because the ecru glass-curtains (raw silk costing a dollar and a quarter a yard) linger so harmoniously between the gray-brown of the wallpaper and the cream of the woodwork.

The paper was a successful experiment; in the days of our decorating youth we tried several different sorts, - dark and light, figured and plain, - despairing until we found this copy of an old paper. It is light enough to give space to the hall, and its diamonded pattern sufficiently soft to be restful. Best of all, its quiet tones are a prelude to the panel of quaint wall-paper at the head of the stairs. That was brought over from France in a sailing vessel just after the War of 1812, and three Hanover houses were adorned with the splendor of its cargo. This piece is all that is left to us of its Empire classic charms; and so, striving to make it visual to you, I cannot help but remember the comments of our local paper hanger, we being as proud as Punch, you see. "Well, Professor," he said with sympathy, "if I was you, an' the College would n't do any better'n that by me, I'd paste newspaper over it!"

How I wish I could show you the door - no, I don't really intend it at all in the rude way it sounds: I mean the outside of my Colonial green door, that you might lift the heavy brass knocker, and observe how roundly it raps. It is n't the original one; that, alas, was purloined the night before we moved in; some antiquarian dilettante, we suspect, for, of course, the days of knocker-wrenching for pure sport were in the past, even with us. But ours is much finer - one salvaged for five dollars from the wreckage of an old Salem house, this knocker that I must keep perpetually, blinkingly bright.

Living in a picture post-card house is such a responsibility! It imposes an ideal upon you. You know, my cottage is like an old, old lady who has been very beautiful in her youth, and who must now go softly all her days. That's why she is so much lovelier by candlelight: that is why her brasses must shine, her windowpanes glisten, her shutters be hall and drawing-room done in just this paper, only it is in much better condition"; or who, perceiving my few pieces of Sunderland lustre, detail the intimate beauties of "a whole set, perfectly lovely, a deeper rose than this, you know," that some friend holds in happy possession. They affect me very much as the Red Queen did Alice, when she waved her hand triumphantly, and said, "Why, I could show you mountains in comparison to which this would be a valley!"

Then there are the visitors who kindly set you right about your furniture; its date, nationality, and previous condition of servitude. O------entertained the last one; I was informed later that he was a diamond in the rough; but I was out in the kitchen "a-spicing marmalet," and far too busy to take any hand in his polishing. Fragments like this drifted in to me: -

The Rough Diamond (pausing before my Empire card-table). That's a good old piece. English eighteenth century.

I could hear O------'s pained protests that it was Massachusetts nineteenth; but the man waved aside his objections; "No, English eighteenth," he said firmly. "But," he added kindly, "you'll learn in time. [Here the White Queen popped into my head.] You see, I have an aunt who has a lot of this old stuff lying around; that's how I happen to know so much about it."

But most people are so nice, oh, so very nice and appreciative. That little pleased man who comes each year, - always from some different Middle Western state, - and asks for just one of my autumn blossoms to keep in memory of his visit. And those delightful tourists from the Pacific slope, who were prepared to love and admire everything they saw. It was very early in the morning, and the plants had gone out from the dining-room window-boxes to be sprayed on the porch. I was just preparing to apologize for their empty appearance, when one of the women clapped her hands in ecstasy and cried: "Oh, those delightful old kitchen sinks! Where did you get them? I never saw any before!"

I am usually truthful, but I had n't the heart to snub her by a correction.

My sense of humor was not always working on time, however. I remember, back in the limbo of early household struggles, when there were three of us, and the Big Daughter was the Baby, that a number of gigantic people came to see the house. How big they were, and how many they seemed! Perhaps there were only four of them, but they appeared to fill the cottage. I know I have a memory of one huge lady wedged into my steep stairway, as she sought to ascend to the sacred chamber, asking co-quettishly: "Did you say Noah or Daniel?"

Maybe I should not recall this with such bitter pleasure if, after they had gone, the Baby had n't run to me with outstretched hand and cried: "Look, Mama! The man gaved me a shiny penny."

It was a quarter! I gasped my horror. To think of being tipped for having shown my home! All its sanctity seemed violated. "Run after them! Make them take it back!" I commanded.

But O------, who bore it more philosophically, said:

"They're liberal. It's more than I used to give to see an Italian palazzo."

And then the Gordian knot was cut by the Baby, who trotted back wailing, "I 've lost my shiny penny down ve'teps."

There it lies to this hour, unsought, the hidden memory of my one douceur.

Nowadays it would n't bother me a bit; one of the privileges of advancing age is that your humor keeps pace with your years. Otherwise I should be distressed by the horror of the moment when I suddenly discovered, after showing some particularly nice New York people over the house, that I had developed a real professional patter. Like this, you know. "And here Nelson fell," and "Queen Elizabeth slept on this very bed."But I did n't mind; I just changed my technique.

Come and see if I have not. Besides, Our Town is worth visiting; quaint and story bookish; our College founded in romantic idealism on the edge of the wilderness, the old white buildings still circling its campus. And the most beautiful elm trees in all the world, I think. Pray observe that row of stately buildings. When you were little, you read "What Katy Did at School," did n't you? Well, this is where it all happened, where Katy and Clover lived; the last house - now swept out of the path of progress - was the Nunnery; but next to it, still standing, is the old President's place,1 where Berry Searles used to tie cakes to the strings that the girls dropped from the windows; and, directly around the corner, is part of the fence past which Rose Red paraded, adorned with soap and towel and sponge, on her way to the bathhouse.

I think it's so pleasant to know this; it made me feel friends at once with "Hillsover." And that, when all is told, is the real thing about life, is it not?

1 Alas, this too has been moved by "civic haste."