The same taste which made the staircase the centre of decoration within, made the front door the sole point of ornamentation without; and equal beauty is there focused. Worthy of study and reproduction, many of the old-time front doors are with their fine panels, graceful, leaded side windows, elaborate and pretty fan-lights, and slight but appropriate carving. The prettiest leaded windows I ever saw in an American home were in a thereby glorified hen-house. They had been taken from the discarded front door of a remodelled old Falmouth house. The hens and their owner were not of antiquarian tastes, and relinquished the windows for a machine-made sash more suited to their plebeian tastes and occupations. Many colonial doors had door-latches or knobs of heavy brass; nearly all had a knocker of wrought iron or polished brass, a cheerful ornament that ever seems to resound a welcome to the visitor as well as a notification to the visited. The knocker from the John Hancock House in Boston and that from the Winslow House in Marshfield are here shown; both are now in the custody of the Bostonian Society, and may be seen at the Old State House in Boston. The latter was given to the society by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. The "King-Hooper" House, still standing in Danvers, Massachusetts, closely resembled the Hancock House. This house, built by Robert Hooper in 1754, was for a time the refuge of the royal governor of Massachusetts--Governor Gage; and hence is sometimes called General Gage's Headquarters. When the minute-men marched past the house to Lexington on April 18, 1775, they stripped the lead from the gate-posts. "King Hooper" angrily denounced them, and a minute-man fired at him as he entered the house. The bullet passed through the panel of the door, and the rent may still be seen. Hence the house has been often called The House of the Front Door with the Bullet-Hole. The present owner and occupier of the house, Francis Peabody, Esq., has appropriately named it The Lindens, from the stately linden trees that grace its gardens and lawns. In riding through those portions of our states that were the early settled colonies, it is pleasant to note where any old houses are still standing, or where the sites of early colonial houses are known, the good taste usually shown by the colonists in the places chosen to build their houses. They dearly loved a "sightly location." An old writer said: "My consayte is such; I had rather not to builde a mansyon or a house than to builde one without a good prospect in it, to it, and from it." In Virginia the houses were set on the river slope, where every passing boat might see them. The New England colonists painfully climbed long, tedious hills, that they might have homes from whence could be had a beautiful view, and this was for the double reason, as the old writer said, that in their new homes they might both see and be seen. CHAPTER II THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS