it would be rented for forty dollars a
year to any responsible tenant who would "keep it up."

After examining the house from garret to cellar and looking over the
fields with a critical eye, I telegraphed to the owner, fearful of
losing such a prize, that I would take it for three years. For it
captivated me. The cosy "settin'-room," with a "pie closet" and an upper
tiny cupboard known as a "rum closet" and its pretty fire place--bricked
up, but capable of being rescued from such prosaic "desuetude"; a large
sunny dining-room, with a brick oven, an oven suggestive of brown bread
and baked beans--yes, the baked beans of my childhood, that adorned the
breakfast table on a Sunday morning, cooked with just a little molasses
and a square piece of crisp salt pork in center, a dish to tempt a dying
anchorite.

There wore two broad landings on the stairs, the lower one just the
place for an old clock to tick out its impressive
"Forever--Never--Never--Forever" <i>a la</i> Longfellow. Then the long "shed
chamber" with a wide swinging door opening to the west, framing a
sunset gorgeous enough to inspire a mummy. And the attic, with its
possible treasures.

There was also a queer little room, dark and mysterious, in the center
of house on the ground floor, without even one window, convenient to
retire to during severe thunder storms or to evade a personal interview
with a burglar; just the place, too, for a restless ghost to revisit.

Best of all, every room was blessed with two closets.

Outside, what rare attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land,
stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed,
hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with
plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry
farm.

The situation, too, was exceptional, since the station from which I
could take trains direct to Boston and New York almost touched the
northern corner of the farm, and nothing makes one so willing to stay
in a secluded spot as the certainty that he or she can leave it at any
time and plunge directly into the excitements and pleasures which only a
large city gives.

What charmed me most of all was a tiny but fascinating lakelet in the
pasture near the house; a "spring-hole" it was called by the natives,
but a lakelet it was to me, full of the most entrancing possibilities.
It could be easily enlarged at once, and by putting a wind-mill on the
hill, by the deep