ve his grandfather's
furniture if he will wait a hundred years!"

Nevertheless, with modern methods of manufacture it is by no means
certain that a hundred years will secure possession of the furniture we
buy to-day to our grandchildren. In those early days it was not
uncommon, it was indeed the custom, for some one of the men who were
called "journeymen cabinet-makers"--that is, men who had served their
time and learned their trade, but had not yet settled down to a fixed
place and shop of their own--to take up an abode in the house with the
family which had built it, for a year, or even two or three years,
carrying on the work in some out-house or dependence, choosing and
seasoning the wood, and measuring the furniture for the spaces where it
was to stand.

There was a fine fitness in such furnishing; it was as if the different
pieces actually grew where they were placed, and it is small wonder that
so built and fashioned they should possess almost a human interest.
Direct and special thought and effort were incorporated with the
furniture from the very first, and it easily explains the excellences
and finenesses of its fashioning.

There is an interesting house in Flushing, Long Island, where such
furniture still stands in the rooms where it was put together in 1664,
and where it is so fitted to spaces it has filled during the passing
centuries, that it would be impossible to carry it through the narrow
doors and passages, which, unlike our present halls, were made for the
passing to and fro of human beings, and not of furniture.

[Illustration: COLONIAL MANTEL AND ENGLISH HOB-GRATE (SITTING-ROOM IN
MRS. CANDACE WHEELER'S HOUSE)]

It is this kind of interest which attaches us to colonial furniture and
adds to the value of its beauty and careful adaptation to human
convenience. In the roomy "high boys" which we find in old houses there
are places for everything. They were made for the orderly packing and
keeping of valuable things, in closetless rooms, and they were made
without projecting corners and cornices, because life was lived in
smaller spaces than at present. They were the best product of a
thoughtful time--where if manufacture lacked some of the machinery and
appliances of to-day, it was at least not rushed by breathless
competition, but could progress slowly in careful leisure. Of course we
cannot all have colonial furniture, and indeed it would not be according
to the spirit of our time, for the arts