It was a quiet, old-fashioned farm-house, with gables and projections and large rooms and pleasant fireplaces and low ceilings and small windows, looking some of them toward the village, with its houses of white nestled among the trees, and some of them upon the hills, whose shadows enfolded the farm-house in an early twilight at night, and in the morning reflected back the warm sunshine which lay so brightly upon their wooded sides. There was a kitchen with a door to the north, and a door to the south, and a door to the east, leading out into the woodshed, and there were stairs leading to an upper room, and a fire-place “big enough to roast an ox,” Hester said, when, with her basket and bandbox and umbrella and camlet cloak and bird cage and kittens and Aleck, she was dropped at her new home and began to reconnoitre, deciding, first, that the late tenants of the place were “shiffless critters, or they would never have lived there so long with only a wooden latch and a wooden button on the outside door,” and second, that they were “dirty as the rot, or they would never have left them stains on the buttry shelf, that looked so much like cheese-mould.” Hester was not altogether pleased with the house. It came a little hard to change from luxurious Millbank to this old brown farm-house, with its oaken floors and stone hearth and tiny panes of glass, and for a time the old lady was as homesick as she could be. But this only lasted until she got well to work in the cleaning process, which occupied her mind so wholly that she forgot herself, and only thought how to make the house a fitting place for her boy to come to after his travels West. Roger had given her money with which to furnish the house, and she had added more of her own, while Frank, when parting with her, had slipped into her hands one hundred dollars, saying to her, “Roger is too proud to take anything from me, and I want you to use this for the house.”