cal settlers attempt to carry out one of Sir Thomas More's
Utopian notions. Upon the whole, I think I should rather have a Nipmuck
squaw cooking in my kitchen, or a Pequot warrior digging in my garden,
than to have a white burglar or ruffian in either situation.

It is well to observe in passing that no gingerly nicety of regard in
calling those who served by any other name than servant, was shown or
heeded in olden times. They believed with St. Paul, "Art thou called
being a servant? Care not for it." All hired workers in the house, hired
laborers in the field, those contracting to work under a master at any
trade for a period of time, apprentices, and many whom we should now
term agents or stewards, were then called servants, and signed contracts
as servants, and did not appear at all insulted by being termed
servants.

IV

HOME INTERIORS

It is easy to gain a definite notion of the furnishing of colonial
houses from a contemporary and reliable source--the inventories of the
estates of the colonists. These are, of course, still preserved in court
records. As it was customary in early days to enumerate with much
minuteness the various articles of furniture contained in each room,
instead of classifying or aggregating them, we have the outlines of a
clear picture of the household belongings of that day.

The first room beyond the threshold of the door that one finds named in
the houses "of the richer sort," is the entry. This was apparently
always bare of furniture, and indeed well it might be, for it was seldom
aught but a vestibule to the rest of the house, containing, save the
staircase, but room enough to swing the front door in opening. Dr. Lyon
gives the inventory of John Salmon of Boston in the year 1750 as the
earliest record which he has found of the use of the word hall instead
of entry, as we now employ it. In the _Boston News Letter_, thirty one
years earlier, on August 24th, 1719, I find this advertisement: "Fine
Glass Lamps & Lanthorns well gilt and painted both Convex and Plain.
Being suitable for Halls, staircases, or other Passage ways, at the
Glass Shop in Queen Street." This advertisement is, however,
exceptional. The hall in Puritan houses was not a passageway, it was the
living-room, the keeping-room, the dwelling-room, the sitting-room; in
it the family sat and ate their meals--in, it they lived. Let us see
what was the furniture of a Puritan home-room in early days, and what
its valu