Well, Tabitha's headstone now overlooks the place where the little children go along to school. If you should go into the primary rooms after school-hours, you would see the sand-tables and the little desks, and, hanging around the walls, a series of paper cut-outs of the Three Bears and the Little Red Hen. And if you should ask to be allowed to look at the register, you would find there some names that would remind you of the cabins of the Mayflower and the Fortune and the Ann, together with some that came over in a later ship. Surely the boys and girls of to-day will not object if we imagine Tabitha calling the roll of their last names in alphabetical order? She stands beside her spinning-wheel and begins: "Alden, Cook, Crane, Dante, Davenport, Deschamps, Donovan, Kitchin, Kerrigan, Locatelli, Malaguto, Metz, Morgan--" And she goes on, adjusting her voice to the musical variety of the names, until she ends the alphabet with "Thornhill, Vacchino, Wood, and Worcester." It is like a pleasant chant of the nations. It is a very pretty question whether Tabitha Plaskett could maintain the quiet orderliness that we see now in these primary rooms, and make headway with her spinning at the same time. Would she apply the skeins of yarn internationally? And would she know just what to do with the sand-tables? If she could keep school again in her old house now, perhaps, instead of punishing the wicked, she would reward the just by letting them go into the front room, when they were very good, to look at the dog running like a rocking-horse on the blue tile. [Illustration: "Nautical House"] Another kind of house that stirs our "sense of the past" is the sort that really does seem old on the outside. A little way down Sandwich Street is the Howland House, built in 1666, recently repaired and opened to visitors. If we are looking for a house that actually did come under the eye of the Pilgrims, this is one. A plain gable cottage, now painted the dull red that we associate with "little-red-schoolhouse" coloring, it stands a little back from the busy street, and the visitor goes in through a turnstile at the gate. Inside, all sorts of old furniture, including spinning-wheel and carriage-top bed, make it look as much as possible as if it were still inhabited. Other houses that were built in the sixteen hundreds, especially the Holmes House, also repay the trouble of searching them out. And when we find them, they look as if they had been built in the spirit of Governor Bradford's specifications about the colony's purpose in founding the Plymouth Plantation: "Not out of any newfanglednes or other such like giddie humor, by which men are oftentimes transported to their great hurt and danger, but for sundrie weightie & solid reasons." There is not much "giddie humor" about the old beams and rafters that have borne the solid weight of two hundred and fifty years.