"Can you tell us," said a gentleman, leaning out of the car and calling back to us, "whether this house is open to visitors?"
"We don't know," said I, "but we know that Mr. John Alden lives here."
"I'll ask him," said the gentleman from Indiana; and he went to the door.
"He says it's open to-day," reported our new guide in a moment, helping his family out of the car, and giving the youngest child a big jump up into his arms.
Barbara and I, abandoning trailing arbutus, merged ourselves with the family group, and went in at the front door.
The little hallway is papered with the kind of paper you sometimes see in houses where "George Washington spent the night"—gray, with landscapes. But, in addition to the landscapes in this paper, there are slender pillars in groups, a design that makes you think of a miniature Alma Tadema picture, all in gray. This wall-paper is, of course, not as old as the house, but it is old-fashioned enough to be interesting.
We threaded our way in single file around the door, into the hallway, and our host invited us first to go upstairs.
The stairs go straight up beside the great chimney, very steep and narrow, each stair twice as tall as a modern stair and half as deep. At the top, we went around the slope of the chimney and into the rooms above. Here, in these low square rooms, with the supporting beams still showing the marks of the broad-axe, and the wide boards of the floor attesting the size of timber-growth in the early days, we found a perfect paradise of old-time furniture stored away. We were allowed to stop and prowl among the old possessions. None of the things used by Priscilla are here, of course; these are the accumulations of generations that followed her.
