"In the evenings the children gathered with their books and slates round the table in the family sitting room. The silence would be broken for a minute by the long, mysterious blast of a horn announcing the arrival in town of the evening mail, then the rattle of its passing wheels, then silence again, save the singing of the wood fire. Studies over, there would be games till bedtime. If these became too noisy, or the father had brought home his law papers from the office, enjoining strictest quiet, then there was flight to another room--perhaps, in winter, to the kitchen, where hung the crane over the coals in the broad old fireplace, upon whose iron back a fish forever baked in effigy. "When bedtime came, it was hard to leave the warm fire to go up into the unwarmed bedrooms; still harder next morning to get up out of the comfortable feather beds and break the ice in the pitchers for washing. But hardship made hardihood. In summer it was pleasant enough to look out from the upper windows; those of the boys' room looked out over the Cove and the farms and woodlands toward Mount Washington, full in view on the western horizon; while the eastern chambers commanded a then unobstructed view of the bay, White Head, Port Prebble, and the lighthouse on Cape Elizabeth." One day in 1820, when the family was gathered about the fire, Henry was on tiptoe with eager excitement. He had written a poem and had sent it to The Portland _Gazette_. Would it be in the paper which his father had in his hand as he seated himself before the fire? Robertson, in his life of the poet, has described those anxious moments: "How carefully his father unfolded the damp sheet, and how carefully he dried it at the fire ere beginning to read it! And how much foreign news there seemed to be in it! At last Henry and a sympathetic sister who shared his secret, obtained a peep over their parent's shoulder--and the poem was there!" There are sixteen rooms in the old house. In Henry's day these rooms were heated by eight fireplaces, which consumed thirty cords of wood during the long winter. On the first floor are the great living-room, the kitchen with its old fireplace, and the den, once the dining-room. On the desk still shown in this room Longfellow wrote, in 1841, "The Rainy Day," whose opening lines are: "The day is cold, and dark, and dreary, It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary."