Winter and summer the
hall-door, which had long lost the knocker, lay hospitably open. The
parlor had a very equivocal appearance; for the furniture, though
originally good and of excellent materials, was stained and dinged and
hacked in a manner that denoted but little sense of care or cleanliness.
Many of the chairs, although not worn by age, wanted legs or backs,
evidently from ill-usage alone--the grate was without fire-irons--a
mahogany bookcase that stood in a recess to the right of the fireplace,
with glass doors and green silk blinds, had the glass all broken and
the silk stained almost out of its original color; whilst inside of
it, instead of books, lay a heterogeneous collection of garden seeds
in brown paper--an almanac of twenty years' standing, a dry ink-bottle,
some broken delf, and a large collection of blue-moulded shoes and
boots, together with an old blister of French flies, the lease of their
farm, and a great number of their receipts for rent. To crown all, the
clock in the other recess stood cobwebbed about the top, deprived of the
minute hand, and seeming to intimate by its silence that it had given
note of time's progress to this idle and negligent family to no purpose.

On the drawing-room stairs there lay what had once been a carpet, but
so inseparable had been their connection that the stairs were now worn
through it, and it required a sharp eye to distinguish such fragments
of it as remained from the color of the dirty boards it covered and the
dust that lay on both.

On entering the kitchen, Peety and his little girl found thirteen or
fourteen, in family laborers and servants of both sexes, seated at a
long deal table, each with a large wooden noggin of buttermilk and a
spoon of suitable dimensions, digging as if for a wager into one or
other of two immense wooden bowls of stirabout, so thick and firm in
consistency that, as the phrase goes, a man might dance on it. This,
however, was not the only picture of such enjoyment that the kitchen
afforded. Over beside the dresser was turned upon one side the huge pot
in which the morning meal had been made, and at the bottom of which,
inside of course, a spirit of rivalry equally vigorous and animated, but
by no means so harmonious, was kept up by two dogs and a couple of pigs,
which were squabbling and whining and snarling among each other, whilst
they tugged away at the scrapings, or residuum, that was left behind
after the stirabout had been em