Yet the Cranch house was really something to brag about. Architects and photographers had come in pursuit of it long before the diffused quaintness of Harpledon made it the prey of the magazine illustrator. The Cranch house was not quaint; it owed little to the happy irregularities of later additions, and needed no such help. Foursquare and stern, built of a dark mountain granite (though all the other old houses in the place were of brick or wood), it stood at the far end of the green, where the elms were densest and the village street faded away between blueberry pastures and oakwoods. A door with a white classical portico was the only eighteenth century addition. The house kept untouched its heavy slate roof, its low windows, its sober cornice and plain interior panelling—even the old box garden at the back, and the pagoda-roofed summer house, could not have been much later than the house. I have said that the latter owed little to later additions; yet some people thought the wing on the garden side was of more recent construction. If it was, its architect had respected the dimensions and detail of the original house, simply giving the wing one less story, and covering it with a lower-pitched roof. The learned thought that the kitchen and offices, and perhaps the slaves’ quarters, had originally been in this wing; they based their argument on the fact of there being no windows, but only blind arches, on the side toward the garden Waldo Cranch said he didn’t know; he had found the wing just as it was now, with a big empty room on the ground floor, that he used for storing things, and a few low-studded bedchambers above. The house was so big that he didn’t need any of these rooms, and had never bothered about them. Once, I remember, I thought him a little short with a fashionable Boston architect who had insisted on Mrs. Durant’s bringing him to see the house, and who wanted to examine the windows on the farther, the invisible, side of the wing. “Certainly,” Cranch had agreed. “But you see those windows look on the kitchen-court and the drying-ground. My old housekeeper and the faithful retainers generally sit there in the afternoons in hot weather, when their work is done, and they’ve been with me so long that I respect their habits. At some other hour, if you’ll come again—. You’re going back to Boston tomorrow? So sorry! Yes, of course, you can photograph the front as much as you like. It’s used to it.” And he showed out Mrs. Durant and her protégé. When he came back a frown still lingered on his handsome brows. “I’m getting sick of having this poor old house lionized. No one bothered about it or me when I first came back to live here,” he said. But a moment later he added, in his usual kindly tone: “After all, I suppose I ought to be pleased.”