324 AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
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8 pete. *, 
The dining-room has an ancient crane and kettle 
Several years ago a traveler described the historic house as 
follows: 
“Coming from the direction of Marlborough, at a little 
distance, the gambrel roof of the ‘Wayside Inn’ peeps 
above a dense mass of foliage. A sharp turn of the road, 
which once passed under a triumphal arch composed of two 
lordly elms, and you are before the house itself. Formerly 
the capacious barns and tall sign-posts stood across the old 
grass-bordered country road, which leads straight up to the 
tavern door. ‘The general appearance of things, however, 
has been much altered by the building of a new macadam 
August, 1909 
road past the spot by the State. 
But let us go in. 
‘Everything remains as of old. 
There is the bar in one corner of 
the common room, with its wooden 
portcullis, made to be hoisted or let 
down at pleasure, but over which 
never appeared the ominous an- 
nouncement, ‘No liquors sold over 
this bar.’ The little desk, where 
the tipplers’ score was set down, 
and the old escritoire, looking as if 
it might have come from some hos- 
pital for decayed and battered fur- 
niture, are there now. ‘The bare 
floor, which once received its regu- 
lar morning sprinkling of clean 
white sea-sand; the bare beams and 
timbers everhead, from which the 
whitewash has fallen in flakes, and 
the very oak of which is seasoned 
with the spicy vapors steaming 
from pewter flagons, all remind us of the good old days be- 
fore the introduction of steam and the multitudinous uses 
of electricity, and the flood of new ideas. Governors, mag- 
istrates, generals, with scores of others whose names are 
remembered with honor, have been here to quaff a health or 
indulge in a drinking-bout. 
“In the guests’ room, on the left of the entrance, the win- 
dow-pane bears the following recommendation, cut with a 
gem that sparkled on the finger of that young roysterer, 
William Molineux, Jr., whose father was the man that 
walked beside the King’s troops in Boston to save them from 
A typical American inn of Colonial and Revolutionary days 
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