The rent of the house was £26 a year. It contained two sitting-rooms and four bedrooms, with a kitchen. The parlor, or best sitting-room, was hung with five pieces of fine tapestry; the other sitting-room with gray linsey-woolsey and gilt leather; the bedrooms had hangings of striped cloth. Curtains of green cloth with a green carpet decorated the parlor; the other rooms had green, say, or "sad color" striped curtains. The best bedroom contained a magnificent "wrought"--_i.e._, carved--bedstead with a canopy, curtains, a valance, and chairs all of the same material. There were three other bedrooms, one for Mr. Arthur, one for the nurse and the baby, unless they slept at the foot of the big bed, and one for the maids. The gardener slept out of the house. The furniture of the parlor consisted of one central table--the dining-table--a table with a drawer, a cupboard, a clock case, a leather chair, a plush chair, six green cloth chairs, and two green stools. The carpet and curtains have been already mentioned; there were no pictures, no cabinets, no book-shelves, no mirrors, no sofas. The other room was more simply furnished with a Spanish table, a plain table, and a few chairs. Two of the bedrooms had looking-glasses, and there was a very generous provision of feather-beds, bolsters, pillows, and blankets, which speaks of comfort for the night. The inventory of the kitchen furniture is, unfortunately, incomplete. There is no mention at all made of any china-ware. Yet porcelain was by this time in common use. It was made at Bow and at Chelsea. In middle-class houses the master and mistress used it at table, while servants and children still had pewter or even wooden platters. The inventory speaks of porringers, doubtless of wood, of pewter candlesticks--there are no brass candlesticks--of a three-pint pewter pot, of a great and little bowl--for possets and hot spiced ale--and of wooden platters. Nothing is said of silver; there are no silver cups--in the century before this no respectable householder was without one silver mazer at least; there are no silver candlesticks; there is no mention of forks. Now the two-pronged fork of steel was made in Sheffield certainly in the middle of the century. It would be curious if the ordinary household still kept up the old fashion of eating without forks so late as 1677. Such was the equipment of the house, one sitting-room, and one bedroom handsomely, the rest plainly, furnished.