The Hartington house was a mansion, a brick manor-house. We were met at the great door by a young untidy woman, whose clear pink-and-white complexion and curly hair could not, however, compensate for her lack of good teeth, several front teeth being missing and the others discolored. This poor care and poor condition of the teeth is most common among New England women in the country. Nearly every woman over thirty years of age will show when speaking two rows of blue-white porcelain disks so evidently false that they hardly seem like teeth, but look like a “card” of cheap buttons. We thought her the daughter of the house; she proved to be its mistress, the wife of Anthony Hartington. A more desolate, unhappy, hopeless home I have never seen. The elderly gloomy man, who now entered, proved to be Anthony himself. He spoke but little, and from the young wife, who seemed in a feverish state of excitement at our visit, we learned the forlorn and desolate story of the household. Anthony had married early in life and had had nine children, all of whom, with his wife, had died of that fell curse of New England—consumption. The last child, a daughter, Luriella, had died in June. This young wife had been her school friend and had married the forlorn old man two years ago, in order to come to live there and nurse her friend through her last illness, thus giving a touching example of the life-sacrifices and self-abnegations so sadly frequent in New England country homes. “We didn’t think she’d live through the winter,” she said, “but she did, and died in June. I was glad she lived till it was warm. It is so cold here in winter,” she added apologetically. A heavy gloom settled on us as we walked from room to room, and I was additionally overwhelmed by the uncanny, unreasoning sense that I had been there before, had lived there. It was all so familiar to me, so strangely well known, that I could scarcely speak, but walked bewildered and frightened through the rooms I had known a hundred years ago. I have never felt at any other time that sense of pre-existence, but I know that nothing about that old house was new to me. The upper part of the windows were of small panes of greenish “bull’s-eye” glass, rarely found in the country now; the lower panes of cheap, modern glass, some being broken and pasted over with dirty bits of calico and paper, and all as opaque with dirt as the ancient upper panes. Outside the windows lay an unkempt tangle of lilac bushes, shrubs, weeds, straggling withered flowers, box borders, and thistles, that once had been a lovely, well-kept garden, but had evidently been unentered and unheeded for years. It stretched down the hill-side to the well-tenanted family graveyard with its moss-grown and chipped slate headstones with their winged cherubs’ heads and crossbones. I had often gathered flowers in that garden; I remembered it well, and had walked and played among the gravestones.