And Grandma’s old house, too. How low the rooms are now! There was a time when, caught up in the arms of an uncle, and seated on his shoulder, the laughing faces below me seemed remote indeed to my half-pleased, half-frightened eyes. How tall I feel, almost stately, as I enter the rooms now; and what a chill and gloom strike to the marrow of my being to find no longer the dear old wrinkled face to greet me! To see the same paper on the walls, the same clock on the mantel, the same familiar things at every turn, worn and faded, but still there, while that cherished face, and those beneficent, toil-worn hands, and the tired, pain-racked heart are gone forever! No one was ever so hospitable as Grandpa and Grandma. “Just sit by and have a bite of something,” Grandma would urge, unaware that she was dispensing a blessing instead of asking a boon. Their meals were frugal--no recollection of bounty comes to me, except at Thanksgiving or other family reunions; but Grandma’s bread and butter, her warmed-up potatoes, and her sugar cookies (with caraway seeds in them), touched the spot as no other food ever did or can. Then she used to place a cup of tea (green tea, it always was) slyly by my plate, saying: “I guess your Ma won’t care this time if you take a little.” I can see the little brown tea-pot now as she brings it from the back of the stove; the silver lustre sugar-bowl with its ribbed sides, and the nick on the knob of the cover; the blue dishes; the Britannia spoons--no one but Grandma had Britannia spoons--and the thin, pointed silver ones; the yellow-handled knives; and the funny little two-tined fork that Grandma herself used--the rest of us had forks with three tines. There’s the Boston rocker in which Grandpa sat of a winter evening and peeled apples for drying. I wonder where his little old “shoe-knife” is. “What makes your hands tremble so, Grandpa?” Sister would ask; but in spite of the tremor he peeled a heaping pile of an evening.