House and Garden 
associations with known people and loved 
places. 
Entering the dining-room you come face 
to face with a great fireplace that was the 
cooking place of the farmhouse. Not many 
years since the kettle that fed the family 
was slung by a chain from a rod in the chim¬ 
ney and the fire beneath it built with logs 
cut in the wood-lot nearby. In the dining¬ 
room you again meet mahogany of the late 
eighteenth century in corner cupboard, pier- 
table, centre-table, side-table, and sideboard 
whose simple design is such a credit to Hepple- 
white that it must be remembered as his, and 
again ivory-tinted walls. But, instead of 
old red, the curtaining here is a dull yellow, 
of a stuff similar to that in the living-room. 
The china, Canton of course, is stood up on 
a great plate-rack over the sideboard and 
high piled on shelves alongside of the fire¬ 
place. Above the fireplace is as simple a 
mantel as that of the living-room and above 
the mantel—for by the house’s greatest fire¬ 
place the household gods should be—an 
engraving of Lincoln. Nearby is an en¬ 
graving of the Declaration of Independence 
below its signers “in conclave assembled,” 
and not far away a photograph of Wordsworth 
as he was in the Dove Cottage days, for it is 
that Wordsworth we hold of highest account. 
Upstairs the two bedrooms reveal again the 
charm of mahogany furniture against ivory- 
tinted walls, with hangings in one room of 
yellow flowered chintz and coverings in the 
other of old blue. From both rooms the 
windows look on beautiful bits of our Wissa- 
hickon Hills, framed often in great oak 
boughs and broken by few houses. Ten 
minutes’ walk takes us to the aloofness of 
hemlocks and less to great rocks that jut out 
in the ravine of the Wissahickon where we 
sit on summer evenings and watch the night- 
herons fly up and down through the dusk. 
In the house itself the happiest hours are 
those of winter evenings when loud winds 
are up. Then we sit by the fire of wood the 
ice storms have supplied from our own trees 
and talk of the good things of earth. I here 
are no lamps lit, but the walls are warm with 
the firelight. Our hearts grow cheerier 
with every wail of the northwest, with every 
rasp of snow sharp as sand against the win¬ 
dow. It brings closer the charm of home 
when the night so contrasts our ruddy hearth 
with the lonely wind and the helpless driven 
snow. 
Do you wonder I seek this home eagerly of 
evenings, beckoned by tossed boughs or led by 
flashing sunset lights? Do you wonder I leave 
it regretf ully of mornings, even though station- 
ward I front the full light of the risen sun and 
the absorbing work of the busy day to be? 
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