oda-fount, extends along one side of the room.

At my entrance an elderly person was smacking his lips with a zest
which satisfied me that the cellars of the Province House still hold
good liquor, though doubtless of other vintages than were quaffed by
the old governors. After sipping a glass of port-sangaree prepared by
the skilful hands of Mr. Thomas Waite, I besought that worthy
successor and representative of so many historic personages to conduct
me over their time-honored mansion. He readily complied, but, to
confess the truth, I was forced to draw strenuously upon my
imagination in order to find aught that was interesting in a house
which, without its historic associations, would have seemed merely
such a tavern as is usually favored by the custom of decent city
boarders and old-fashioned country gentlemen. The chambers, which were
probably spacious in former times, are now cut up by partitions and
subdivided into little nooks, each affording scanty room for the
narrow bed and chair and dressing-table of a single lodger: The great
staircase, however, may be termed, without much hyperbole, a feature
of grandeur and magnificence. It winds through the midst of the house
by flights of broad steps, each flight terminating in a square
landing-place, whence the ascent is continued toward the cupola. A
carved balustrade, freshly painted in the lower stories, but growing
dingier as we ascend, borders the staircase with its quaintly twisted
and intertwined pillars, from top to bottom. Up these stairs the
military boots, or perchance the gouty shoes, of many a governor have
trodden as the wearers mounted to the cupola which afforded them so
wide a view over their metropolis and the surrounding country. The
cupola is an octagon with several windows, and a door opening upon the
roof. From this station, as I pleased myself with imagining, Gage may
have beheld his disastrous victory on Bunker Hill (unless one of the
tri-mountains intervened), and Howe have marked the approaches of
Washington's besieging army, although the buildings since erected in
the vicinity have shut out almost every object save the steeple of the
Old South, which seems almost within arm's length. Descending from the
cupola, I paused in the garret to observe the ponderous white-oak
framework, so much more massive than the frames of modern houses, and
thereby resembling an antique skeleton. The brick walls, the materials
of which were imported from Holland,