The Next-To-Nothing House | by Alice Van Leer Carrick

Sometimes, as I look back over the long years, I am glad that when we went to housekeeping we, as the Man with the Duster would say, "were inconveniently poor." Otherwise I know what we should have done: we should have hastened to build, and lived to regret it; we should have filled our house with furniture which, in later days, would have been a remission of sins just to look at - debased, ungainly sleigh-front bureaus, the lower part of highboys bought under the ingenuous impression that they were lowboys, and many plates of the too-ubiquitous willow-pattern. We might have been comfortable, but we certainly should n't have been beautiful, and truly there is no bliss in ignorance when it touches our own lives. And instead of all these misfortunes, we moved into a little modest white cottage befitting our modester income, and allowed its eighteenth-century loveliness to be our gradual education...

To Grace Kimball, lacking whose wise and pleasant counsel my book would never have been written; to Betty and Bill who love my old furniture, and to Anne and Gene who don't; and to all those who have visited me, either in person or in prints, I dedicate "The Next-to-Nothing House."