One large dresser in the kitchen was found to be literally filled with battered and broken brass and pewter candlesticks, glass whale-oil lamps, snuffers, pewter savealls, extinguishers, and trays, and brass chimney hooks for shovel and tongs. We rescued from this medley several candlesticks, two curious Dutch hanging-lamps, and a really beautiful but broken candelabra of Sheffield plate. These we placed with the china on the kitchen table. I wished to add the pewter porringers found in the parlor, but the wife softly drawled in her nasal voice: “He won’t sell ’em—they were hers—she used to make mud-pies in ’em when she was little.” And pretty playthings they must have been—fifteen dear little shallow pewter posnets and porringers with flat pierced handles, varying in size from one large enough to hold a pint to a true doll’s or a “’prentice” porringer an inch and a half in diameter. They were full of little, common, colored pebbles and shells, dried seeds, and old purple glass beads, perhaps just as “she” had last played with them. Other and more distant memories, too, may have clung to the old porringers—of days when the old man was a boy and took his “little porringer” and ate his supper of bread and milk from it; and perhaps, in the far years when the old man was a baby, his mother had had served to her in one of these old porringers her “dish of caudle,” that rich mixture of eggs, spices, bread, milk, and wine which was thought years ago to be the proper diet for a sick person. Then we mounted the spiral staircase to the second floor, the chambers. Through this dreary expanse we walked slowly—the dusty half-furnishings growing shabbier and shabbier—still stumbling over broken furniture on the uneven floors, until we entered a south room that was such a blaze of cheerful, yellow, tropical light that we exclaimed with delight. Walls and ceilings were hung solid with long yellow ears of corn, left to dry for use in the winter. Even the old cherry fourpost bedstead was draped with them. Such a color! Such a glory! “She used to like to see them too,” the low voice murmured.