I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed, an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the “dark room,”--a room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;--one could lie under the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead event, and, with a great effort, project one’s self back to that time, and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions. The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was mysterious, and far more terrifying. There was a vast fireplace in the cellar, in which, as Jane, the old colored woman who was sometimes a cook and sometimes a nurse, once solemnly told my cousin and me, the devil dwelt, so that I visited it only once, and there so plainly saw the ugly horns of that dark deity that we fled upstairs and into the sunlight again. It may have been that the crane and the andirons of the old fireplace helped out the impression, though after the original suggestion little was required to strengthen it, and we never went down there again, except to lure a younger cousin as far as the door to shudder in the awful pleasure of witnessing her fear. This gabled wing had been the original house, and additions had been built to it in two directions, with a wide hall, somewhat after the southern fashion in which so many houses in that part of Ohio were built in those days. It seems larger in the retrospect than it is in the reality, and I am not endowing it with the spaciousness of a mansion; it was, in fact, a modest dwelling of a dozen rooms, with an atmosphere that was imparted to it by the furniture that had been brought back from Europe, and the personality that filled it. My grandfather conducted his establishment on a scale of prodigality that had a certain patriarchal air; he had a large family, and he loved to have them all about him, and in the evenings they gathered there at the piano they had bought in Berlin, and when the candles in their curious brass sconces had been lighted, there was music, for the whole family possessed some of that talent which, as President Eliot rightly declares in his lecture on “The Happy Life,” contributes so much real pleasure. My grandfather did not himself sing; or, at least, he sang rarely, and then only one or two Scotch songs, but when he could be induced to do this, the event took on the festal air of a celebration.