e artillery was passing. Soon flash and roar came farther apart
and modified by distance. Nothing was left at last but a soothing rumble
and the whisper of the receding rain. We slept, and woke to find
ourselves rich, in sunlight, blue sky, and overflowing rain-barrels.
This made it washday for Elizabeth and the tribe, and presently all the
lines were full. It was a glorious storm, but that afternoon we moved
our sleeping-arrangements to the house. The painters had finished
up-stairs, and there was no purpose in exposing ourselves to storms
which for all we knew, came straight from Jamaica, where they had a
mania for hitting barns.

CHAPTER THREE

I

_At the threshold of the past_

[Illustration]

I wonder if you are anything like as anxious to get into our old attic
as we were. That is not likely. To us it meant romance, even a kind of
sorcery--a bodily transmigration into the magic past.

Now and then during those August days we would open the door below and
look up, perhaps even climb the stair and peer around a little,
possessed by the spell of it, deterred only by our immediate affairs and
the heat.

[Illustration]

Then at last came a day, a cool Sunday when it was raining softly, and
the tribe were having a "perfectly _lovelly_" time in the barn,
Elizabeth and I climbed the rickety stairway to the Land of the Long
Ago. There could be no better time for it--the quiet rain overhead, no
workmen, no likelihood of visitors.

At the top of the stair we hesitated and looked about with something of
the feeling that I suppose the Egyptian explorer had when he looked into
the furnished tomb of Queen Thi. We were at the threshold of the past.

A small window at each end gave light in plenty. There was a good deal
of dust, and there were some cobwebs in the corners, but these did not
disturb us. Only, we were a little bewildered by the extent of our
possessions. We hardly knew where to begin.

At first we picked our way about rather aimlessly, pointing to this
thing and that, our voices subdued. There were all the high-backed
chairs--fourteen, we counted, with those already carried down. Most of
them would need new rush bottoms and black paint, but otherwise they had
withstood the generations. They were probably a part of the old house's
original furnishing--these and at least one of the spinning-wheels, of
which there were four, the large kind, used for spinning wool; also the
reel for winding yarn. T