In some old houses that have been restored and in many modern constructions done in the manner of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the door hinges in painted rooms have been picked out in black making them most conspicuous. This is a modern conceit--an invention of the modern architect. It was not done in the old days, a fact easily established by carefully scraping through the various coats of paint on an old house. Our great-great-grandmothers had no itching desire for contrasts of that sort. They knew nothing of highboys, grandfather's clocks, low daddys, Lady Washington chairs, courting mirrors, fiddle back chairs or donkey-eared spindle backs. These names are inventions of collectors or antique dealers striving for the picturesque. The highboy, it is true, antedates the others, but in the early days this piece of furniture was called a high chest of drawers and the lowboy was called a low chest. Recently the common =HL= hinge has been described as the "Holy Land" hinge; certainly not referring to the English colonies where there were fully as many sinners as saints. Wooden latches were used on both outside and inside doors in early days and the wooden latch persisted in the back country until comparatively recent times. The iron thumb latch was made by the country blacksmith but more and more it came to be imported from England. The earliest type has spear-point handles. The rounded end comes in after 1700 and is common about 1750. The Norfolk latch, in brass and iron, comes in after the Revolution and was replaced by the common cast-iron thumb latch, invented by Blake in 1840. In examining old hinges and all kinds of hardware always have in mind that the machine-made pointed screw was not invented until 1846. A feature of this hardware trade with England, which is of much interest, is the catalogues that were sent over by the manufacturers in Birmingham. About the year 1770 they began to send out drawings of different pieces of hardware, tools, etc., and this soon developed into sheets of engravings on copper which were bound into books and sent to customers at a distance who then could visualize the goods and order accordingly; size, list price and discount were indicated. Seldom was there a title-page or even a label to indicate a source, but the handmade paper bears its watermark and generally the date when it was made. These catalogues are now difficult to find and the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington, esteems them so highly that a descriptive catalogue of its collection has been published. Probably the largest collection of these catalogues in America is in the library of the Essex Institute at Salem. CHAPTER III HOW THEY FURNISHED THEIR HOUSES