He pushed open the door, and we entered, gazing curiously around us. We stood in a large, square room, evidently a dining and living-room, washed with a greyish plaster, at once warm and cool. There was a deep, wide hearth of faded red brick on one side, and an old oak dresser covered with a very good service of gold-rimmed white china and several pieces of handsome Sheffield plate. The few chairs and settees and the one large table in the centre were all of that solid yet graceful Georgian style that our ancestors brought with them; the bare clean floor and the home-made rugs, taken with this furniture, gave an effect more usual now in a summer cottage than it was then. On the walls were eight or ten water-colour sketches framed in rustic wood; a worn wicker _chaise-longue_ with patchwork cushions, struck a curiously exotic note; two spinning-wheels, a large and a small, flanked the fire and bore every evidence of use, not aestheticism; a silver bowl of unmistakable Queen Anne date, beautifully chased, filled with fiery nasturtiums, stood in strange neighbourliness to a cheap American alarum clock; a lovely, tarnished oval mirror reflected a hideous floral calendar, the advertisement of some seedsman. The room turned in a small ell, and this, which was evidently the kitchen corner of it, could be completely hidden from the rest by a quaint screen, very broad and high, of home manufacture, the body of which was composed of several calfskins beautifully marked and adroitly fitted together. This last gave a touch of quaint antiquity, a hint of the bold and primitive that was deliciously satisfying. I thought it then and still think it a room in ten thousand. It had no other door nor any window opening on the beach, and this produced a softened dimness, a richness, so to speak, of lighting and gloom, a sinking into shadow of the hearth and spinning-wheels, a lightness of the dresser and the polished settle near it that struck the eye with the same contented shock one gets from a mellow Dutch interior--the same impression of previous acquaintance, of a once familiar, only half forgotten home.