nd said with Puritanical severity, "My
friends, there lies the body, but the soul is in hell!"

The dead man had failed to attend the parson's sermons at the old
First Congregational Church, near by, a church that with
successive pastors has slipped from the Orthodoxy of Parson Dunbar
to the most modern type of present-day Unitarianism.

A later dweller in the old house lives in local tradition as
publishing on the bulletin board in the church vestibule his
intention of marriage with a fair lady of the parish, as was the
custom of the day. Another fair lady entering the church on Sunday
morning pointed dramatically at the notice, saying to the sexton,
"Take that notice down, and don't you dare to put it up again till
I give the word."

The sexton, seeming to know who was in charge of things, took it
down and it was not again posted for two years. The marriage then
took place. A few years later the wife died, and after a brief
period of mourning another notice was posted announcing the
marriage of the widower and the lady who had forbidden the banns
of his first marriage. The second marriage took place without
interference, and they lived happily ever after, leaving posterity
in doubt whether the incident in the church vestibule was the
climax in a battle royal between the two ladies for the hand of
the man who dwelt in the old house, or whether the man himself had
loved not wisely but too many.

Another dweller in the old house was a locally celebrated singer
who for years led the choir and the music in the old church,
having one son whom a wealthy Bostonian educated abroad,
"becoming," said the historian sagely, "a great tenor singer, but
very little of a man." These were days of growing importance for
the old house.

Two new rooms were added to the ground-floor back by the simple
expedient of tacking long spruce rafters to the roof, making a
second roof over the old one, leaving the old roof with boards and
shingles still on it. Thus there grew a roof above a roof,--a
shapeless void of a dark attic,--and below, the two rooms.

The use of the spruce rafters and hemlock boarding marks a period
in building little more than a half-century gone. About this time
the house acquired a joint owner, for a local lawyer of
considerable importance joined his fortunes and his house to it,
bringing both with him. This section, two more rooms and an attic,
was moved in from another part of the town and attached very
gingerl