ned the dining-room, with windows facing the
west, with a view of the mountains across the lake, and the dining-room
communicated with the kitchen. One of the western-looking up-stairs
rooms served as my father's study; my sister Una had her chamber, I mine
(which was employed as the guest-chamber upon occasion), and our parents
the other. What more could be asked? for when Rose was born, her crib
stood beside her mother's bedstead.

When we were not asleep--that is, during twelve hours out of the
twenty-four--Una's existence and mine were passed mainly in the outer
sitting-room and in the dining-room. There was plenty to entertain us.
I had my rocking-horse, which I bestrode with perfect fearlessness; my
porcelain lion, which still survives unscathed after the cataclysms
of half a century; my toy sloop, made for me by Uncle Nat; and a
jack-knife, all but the edge and point, which had been removed out of
deference to my youth. Una had a doll, a miniature mahogany centre-table
and bureau, and other things in which I felt no interest. In common,
we possessed the box of wooden bricks, and the big portfolio containing
tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the
Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the
story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large
part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my
father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with
the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the
exception of our father and mother, that we had or desired.

But our father and mother were, of course, the main thing, after all.
She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing,
early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our
questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical;
and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and
"The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible
questions--I suppose with a view to asking me some." They superintended
our projections of creation on the black-board--a great, old-fashioned
black-board, the like of which I have not since beheld; they read to us
and told us stories. Many of these stories were of incidents of their
own child-life; and there was also the narrative of our mother's voyage
to Cuba and back, and residence there when she was about eighteen or
twe