Down the backstairs, through the kitchen and dining-room and parlour, out into the front hall again. That's the way we have to go, because my Hepple-white bedroom lies just across the hall from the parlour, and is much the same ample, square, high-studded sort of chamber - a trifle larger, that's all.

But, perhaps I'd better go back and begin with a story, a story which concerns L------'s redecorated drawing-room, long and lovely and full of some of the most delightful furniture that I know. I said to B------, "It's so beautiful that, when you first see it, you just gasp!" "Ah," replied B------sadly. "Nobody's ever going to gasp at my drawing-room except my husband, and that will be when he gets the bills!" Which is precisely what I am afraid of now with you; but oh, please do gasp both ways; because my yellow-and-blue chamber is charming even if it is expensive. And, really, I am not so sure that it is; expensive, I mean, for lately I have been reading furniture advertisements, reading them not for idle curiosity, but to arrive at comparative values.

At quite a modest, unfashionable shop, I found I could buy a Louis Sixteenth Walnut Suite (four pieces in all) for two hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and it had been reduced from four hundred and ten; at another furniture "Emporium," an Antique Ivory Bedroom Suite (I quote most accurately though I have n't the remotest idea what Antique Ivory is) was just eight dollars and seventy-five cents less, while Queen Anne, William and Mary, and Tudor inaccuracies ran from twenty-five to fifty dollars under the first price. Now my furniture - and it includes a bed, a bureau, a tall chest, a day-bed, three chairs, a light-stand, a shaving-mirror, and two bas-relief looking-glasses - was just three hundred and three dollars and a half. And my accessories, by which I mean rugs, coverlet, tester and valances, curtains, lamp, stove, and various oddments, were only seventy-five dollars and fifty cents more; altogether, you perceive, three hundred and eighty-nine dollars for the whole room - less than some of my friends have paid for a single piece. And my dear furniture was not made wholesale for a credulous public, nor sold at just one enormous single shop, but was fashioned mostly by North Country joiners who loved their craft with a leisurely affection. Two exceptions there are: my sturdy, rather primitive day-bed, which came from a Pennsylvania Dutch settlement, from Manheim where Baron Stiegel had his famous eighteenth-century glass factories; and my lofty, lovely "four-poster," which may very well have been made in England.

There is an engaging legend hereabouts which concerns itself with an Englishman who came to Norwich in pre-Revolutionary days, and, in this little New England town, built a mansion of magnificence, costing, so tradition says, anywhere from thirty to sixty thousand dollars, a really great sum for those days. Workmen were brought from England to carve his stately mantels, much furniture was sent out to embellish his house, and my bed, found in this little hamlet, could easily have been one that he ordered from some London cabinetmaker. From Hepplewhite, perhaps; anyway I like to think so, and certainly, in his "Cabinetmaker's and Upholsterer's Guide," there is a design given which is very similar, except that I truly think mine is finer, that a slenderer grace informs it.

But I am beginning in the middle when I ought to be showing you the room itself, telling you that it is sixteen feet square and nine feet high; that there are three windows, two doors, a mantel, and a Franklin stove, and another defiant radiator which also I have subdued by my gentle books. As to the exposure, why that's northeast, and the room could be a desolate winter chamber were it not warmed by yellows and touches of gilt, and made interesting by just enough blue in the counterpane and coverlet and rugs. The woodwork is painted a deep cream, and the old pine floor is colored a cheerful hue, which is not spruce, nor pumpkin, but a pleasanter, more sunshiny tone than either. Oh, the room was full of perplexing questions, and I pondered them long before I found the right answers. Of course, originally, there had been a fireplace in the chamber - the tall and narrow mantel proved it; but, alas, it had gone long ago to the limbo of lost things, and an abominable air-tight stove took its place. That we speedily got rid of and then, obviously, there were but three things to do: to make the best of our affliction, to tear down the mantel and put a piece of furniture where it had stood, or to ferret out some antiquated Franklin stove and have it adjusted to the chimney.

It was the last solution which we chose, it being suited both to beauty and economy; besides, before the furnace fire is lighted in the fall, or when it goes out in chilly May, my cherished Hepplewhite room can be a barn for comfort, a barn where there is n't any hay to snuggle down in, and a wintry wind whistles through the cracks. For it is directly over the cellar, and that cellar has a dirt floor and endless corridors. Sometimes, when the spring floods are with us, I think of giving gondola parties; such romantic arches there are to pass through, and there is one shuddering, bricked-up place that always reminds me of "The Cask of Amantillado." Still, comfort aside, I think I'd rather have my Franklin stove than the finest highboy in the world, for a fire "trims" a room; even without my silhouettes, my "Peace Mirror," or my old faience, the leaping flames would make that side wall lovely.

My firedogs are the plainest things; stout and black and a little crooked; wrought, I suppose, at some farm smithy. They are scarcely the andirons of my dreams, but then, you would n't have me sit down, Alexander-like, and weep because there were no more antique worlds to conquer, would you? The stove is plain, too; not half so fine as the fire-frame in the parlour; but I have seen early-nineteenth-century advertising-cuts which greatly resembled it, and its shiny brass knobs and rosettes make me very happy. And it was cheap! It came from that so-justly-celebrated wayside auction - I promise never again to refer to it - where I got the rag carpet and the butternut coverlet; and it was only ten dollars, about a fourth of what a new one would cost, and much less than is asked usually for a really old Franklin stove.