ar.

He had to ask ever so many questions, polite questions you know, for he
was not a rude little boy at all, but it seemed so wonderful to him to
be here at last that he could not help exclaiming at everything.

There was the parlor just as he had imagined it, with the row of
seashells across the mantle and the door opening into the porch and
garden and beyond the library with its great deep fireplace, its
old-fashioned andirons and red brick hearth.

Nothing was new in the old house, everything had been made years and
years ago when there was no machinery, and chairs and furniture had to
be turned by hand; for that reason people who made them took more pains
than they do now, so that they would last a long time, and only the
colours in the brocades had faded and the silk worn away in the
cross-stitch work of the antimacassars.

Laurie went from room to room with Aunt Laura, looking at everything.
"Will you show me the cow-pitcher, Aunt Laura?" he asked, and Aunt Laura
laughed and opened a deep cupboard, where the best china was kept, and
took the pitcher down from a high shelf. Such a curious pitcher, it was,
a brown and white china cow--I'm sure it must have been very, very old,
for I never see pitchers like it now-a-days. The tail was curved into a
handle, and the mouth was the spout!

Aunt Laura said that she would keep it on the table every day, full of
cream for his porridge, just as she had done for his mother, when she,
as a little girl, had stayed at the farm.

[Illustration: Aunt Laura shows Laurie the cow-pitcher]

When supper came, how good everything tasted! The home-cured ham,
delicious butter made on the farm, great slices of fresh bread and
schmeirkase--I don't believe many of you boys and girls know what
"Schmeirkase" is, do you? Well, anyway, it is made somehow from thick
sour cream, so thick that it is put in a bag and hung up in the dairy
until it is time to be eaten--when I was a little girl and visited a
farm they used to have schmeirkase for supper, and I always hoped they
would offer me a second helping and they always did! There were
strawberries too, and stewed rhubarb, and chocolate layer cake. And Aunt
Laura put the cake away after supper in a round tin box, in a corner of
the cupboard, and gave Laurie a great slice the next morning to eat, for
fear he would grow hungry before dinner.

"I'm as glad as I can be that I've come," he said, and Uncle Sam and
Aunt Laura smiled at each ot