without control. No one was permitted to enter
this sacred apartment, except the mistress and her confidential maid,
who visited it once a week for the purpose of giving it a thorough
cleaning. On these occasions they always took the precaution of leaving
their shoes at the door, and entering devoutly in their stocking feet.

After scrubbing the floor, sprinkling it with fine white sand,--which
was curiously stroked with a broom into angles and curves and
rhomboids,--after washing the windows, rubbing and polishing the
furniture, and putting a new branch of evergreens in the fireplace, the
windows were again closed to keep out the flies, and the room was kept
carefully locked, until the revolution of time brought round the weekly
cleaning day.

As to the family, they always entered in at the gate, and generally
lived in the kitchen. To have seen a numerous household assembled round
the fire, one would have imagined that he was transported to those happy
days of primeval simplicity which float before our imaginations like
golden visions.

The fireplaces were of a truly patriarchal magnitude, where the whole
family, old and young, master and servant, black and white,--nay, even
the very cat and dog,--enjoyed a community of privilege, and had each a
right to a corner. Here the old burgher would sit in perfect silence,
puffing his pipe, looking in the fire with half-shut eyes, and thinking
of nothing, for hours together; the good wife, on the opposite side,
would employ herself diligently in spinning yarn or knitting stockings.

The young folks would crowd around the hearth, listening with breathless
attention to some old crone of a negro, who was the oracle of the
family, and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would
croak forth, for a long winter afternoon, a string of incredible stories
about New England witches, grisly ghosts, and bloody encounters among
Indians.

In those happy days, fashionable parties were generally confined to the
higher classes, or _noblesse_; that is to say, such as kept their own
cows, and drove their own wagons. The company usually assembled at three
o'clock, and went away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the
fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might reach
home before dark.

The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with
slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into morsels, and swimming in
gravy. The company seated