maintain the quiet orderliness that we see now in these primary rooms, and make headway with her spinning at the same time. Would she apply the skeins of yarn internationally? And would she know just what to do with the sand-tables? If she could keep school again in her old house now, perhaps, instead of punishing the wicked, she would reward the just by letting them go into the front room, when they were very good, to look at the dog running like a rocking-horse on the blue tile.

"Nautical House"

Another kind of house that stirs our "sense of the past" is the sort that really does seem old on the outside. A little way down Sandwich Street is the Howland House, built in 1666, recently repaired and opened to visitors. If we are looking for a house that actually did come under the eye of the Pilgrims, this is one. A plain gable cottage, now painted the dull red that we associate with "little-red-schoolhouse" coloring, it stands a little back from the busy street, and the visitor goes in through a turnstile at the gate. Inside, all sorts of old furniture, including spinning-wheel and carriage-top bed, make it look as much as possible as if it were still inhabited. Other houses that were built in the sixteen hundreds, especially the Holmes House, also repay the trouble of searching them out. And when we find them, they look as if they had been built in the spirit of Governor Bradford's specifications about the colony's purpose in founding the Plymouth Plantation: "Not out of any newfanglednes or other such like giddie humor, by which men are oftentimes transported to their great hurt and danger, but for sundrie weightie & solid reasons." There is not much "giddie humor" about the old beams and rafters that have borne the solid weight of two hundred and fifty years.

In Plymouth there are many houses made partly of brick, with iron S-shaped anchors bolted through their brick-work to the beam inside. There are some of these on the side of Leyden Street near LeBaron Alley. And on North Street, there are great Santa Claus chimneys, with small low houses built around them, the structure of the house looking altogether too tiny to go with the generous flues.

Best of all, perhaps, because they have plenty of space around them, are the unpainted gambrel-roofed houses on the outskirts of the town. Now and then you find one where the shingles that cover the house from top to bottom have weathered a silver gray. Here and there the shingles have curled a trifle, so that they look like the bark of a shagbark walnut tree, in no danger of flying away with the wind, but making the house look crusted, picturesque. And there are some gabled houses where the long slope of the roof has sagged a little, just enough to make a place for moss and shadows, but not enough to look fallen in.

Barbara and I did not find all these the first day, or the next. We spent a good deal of time scouting over the moors, among the bayberry bushes and the pointed red cedars. Now and then we came upon a cranberry bog, hidden away behind what one geologist calls the "tumbled hills of Plymouth."

It was Alexander who showed us the best Colonial mansion. The frame was got out in England, and brought over in 1754, and, tradition says, was put upside down. It belonged to the Winslows—not the Edward Winslow who wrote "Good News From New England" in 1624, but a later branch of the family. The Winslow family seems to have prospered steadily in the early days—one of the cases where, in the elder Winslow's own words, "religion and profit jump together, which is rare."

"I want to show you the Winslow house," said Alexander; "the house where Emerson was married."

"I think we passed it on the corner of North and Winslow," said I. "Isn't it the fine square one, painted yellow and white, with the carving of fruit around the doorways?"

"That's it," admitted Alexander placidly, "but you don't know that house just by going past it on the street."

He led us down North Street to Winslow, and found the point where we could get the best view.

Old Plymouth Doorway

"Now," said he when he had planted us to his satisfaction, "notice the doorway, with those two immense linden-trees shading the path. The original shoots of the Winslow linden-trees were brought to this country in a raisin-box. Up on the front of the house, over the upstairs window, you see the carving of the British Lion and Unicorn. This branch of the Winslows in Revolutionary days remained Tories and were very loyal to the King; and after the war their property went into other hands. But their Lion and Unicorn are as good as ever."

"Is it really true," asked Barbara, "that the house is upside down?"

"Well," said Alexander, "the legend is very old. And the second-story rooms are a great deal higher-studded than the rooms downstairs. There's one door upstairs that looks as if it had been made for a giant. But they say that some of the English builders used to plan a house that way."

Whether the house is upside down or not, one thing is certain—that here Miss Lydia Jackson was married to Emerson. Once in a while an event in the world takes place in precisely the perfect setting. Emerson's marriage was one. The huge English door, almost as broad as it is tall, with its great brass knocker and deep paneling, knows how to swing wide open in a stately way of its own; a proper door to welcome Mr. Emerson. And the rooms inside, with their high white paneling and delicate beading around the top, have dignity in every line. In every room there is a fireplace, with tiles. In the room where Emerson was married, the tiles around the fireplace illustrate Scripture stories—the drawings exactly in the style of the pictures in the New England Primer. Jonah emerges from his specially constructed fish; Elijah sits under his juniper bush; Jacob awakens from his dream. Under each picture is a reference to the Bible, with chapter and verse; so that, if you should fail to recognize any Bible worthy from his picture, you could look him up.

In the hallway, the white staircase, with its mahogany rail, is deeply paneled at the sides, and if you stand beneath the stairway where it turns, you see still more careful paneling on the under side of each stair. The spindles of the balustrade are white and delicately carved, and the slender newel-post is twined with a perfectly proportioned white spiral, like a smooth round stem of a vine, running round and round it, and disappearing into the woodwork of the rail.

This house, with its linden trees, its traditions, its Lion and Unicorn rampant over the sea, was the best example of old-time royalist elegance that we saw.

"Are you going sketching this afternoon?" asked Barbara politely of the artist.

"Yes, on Burial Hill," said he. "Want to come?"

"Don't you ever carry a camp-chair?" said I. For days I had been longing to ask him that question, when I saw him starting out with no visible sketching equipment except a leather affair, which looked like a lawyer's brief-case, strapped over his shoulder.

"Yes, I always take a chair," said he. "It folds. It's in the leather case."

I, who remember the days when people went sketching with an immense French sketching-umbrella, a camp-chair, an easel, and a portfolio, looked with respect upon the leather case.

"Before we go up to the hill," said the artist, "don't you want me to show you the most stunning subject for a painting that I've