Many years ago, it was said that he had thought to bring a wife to the farm-house, which he had brightened up a little, putting a red and green carpet on the floor of the north room, painting the wood-work a light blue, and covering the walls with a yellowish paper of most wonderful design. Six chairs, and a looking-glass, and bureau, and table, had completed the furnishing of that room, to which no bride ever came; and, as Uncle Phil had been wholly reticent with regard to her, the story came gradually to be regarded as a mere fabrication of somebody’s busy brain; and Uncle Phil was set down as one whose heart had never been reached by anything fairer than old black Becky, who had lived with him for years, and grown to be so much like him that one had only to get the serving-woman’s opinion to know what the master’s was. Just as that stiff, cold north room had looked years ago, when made ready for the mythical bride, so it looked now, and so, too, or nearly so, looked the south room, with its Franklin fireplace, its painted floor, and the two strips of rag carpet before the fire, its tall mantel-piece, with two cupboards over it, holding a most promiscuous medley of articles, from a paper of sage down to the almanacs for the last twenty years. Uncle Phil didn’t believe in destroying books, and kept his almanacs as religiously as he did his weekly paper, of which there were barrels full, stowed away in the garret. Besides being the common sitting-room, the south room was also Uncle Phil’s sleeping apartment, and in one corner was his turned-up bed, with its curtain of copperplate, and beyond it the clock-shelf and the clock, and a tall writing-desk, where Uncle Phil’s valuables were kept. Two or three chairs, one on rockers, and one an old-fashioned wooden chair with arms and a cushion in it, completed the furniture, if we except the table, on which lay Walker’s Dictionary, and the big Bible, and a book of sermons by some Unitarian divine, and Uncle Phil’s glasses. The pleasantest room in the whole house was the kitchen, where Aunt Becky reigned supreme, even Uncle Phil yielding to her here, and never saying a word when she made and put down a respectable rag carpet at the end of the long room in which she kept her Boston rocker for company, and her little stuffed sewing chair for herself, and her square stand covered with a towel, and on it a pretty cushion of blue, which matched the string of robins’ eggs ornamenting the little glass hanging beside the window, with its box for brush and combs made of pasteboard and cones. This was Aunt Becky’s parlor, and her kitchen was just as neat and inviting, with its nicely painted floor, and unpainted wood-work, scoured every week, and kept free from dust and dirt by daily wipes and dustings, and a continued warfare against the luckless flies and insects, to whom Becky was a sworn foe. Out in the back room there was a stove which Becky sometimes used, but she would not have it in her