Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a door led into the kitchen, another led into the living-room, another into the storeroom, and two big, slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery with four generations of sliders, covered the cavernous way into the cellar. But they let the smell of apples up, as the garret door let the smell of sage and thyme come down; while from the door of the storeroom, mingling with the odor of apples and herbs, filling the whole house and all my early memories, came the smell of broom-corn, came the sound of grandfather’s loom. Behind the stove in the kitchen, fresh-papered like the walls, stood the sweet-potato box (a sweet potato must be kept dry and warm), an ample, ten-barrel box, full of Jersey sweets that _were_ sweet,--long, golden, syrupy potatoes, grown in the warm sandy soil of the “Jethro Piece.” Against the box stood the sea-chest, fresh with the same paper and piled with wood. There was another such chest in the living-room near the old fireplace, and still another in grandfather’s work-room behind the “tem-plate” stove. But wood and warmth and sweet smells were not all. There was music also, the music of life, of young life and of old life--grandparents, grandchildren (about twenty-eight of the latter). There were seven of us alone--a girl at each end of the seven and one in the middle, which is Heaven’s own mystic number and divine arrangement. Thanksgiving always found us all at grandfather’s and brimming full of thanks. That, of course, was long, long ago. Things are different nowadays. There are as many grandfathers, I suppose, as ever; but they don’t make brooms in the winter any more, and live on farms. They live in flats. The old farm with its open acres has become a city street; the generous old farmhouse has become a speaking-tube, kitchenette and bath--all the “modern conveniences”; the cows have evaporated into convenient cans of condensed “milk”; the ten-barrel box of potatoes has changed into a convenient ten-pound bag, the wood-pile into a convenient five-cent bundle of blocks tied up with a tarred string, the fireplace into a convenient moss-and-flame-painted gas-log, the seven children into one, or none, or into a convenient bull-terrier pup. Still, we may give thanks, for convenient as life has become to-day, it has not yet all gone to the dogs. It is true, however, that there might be fewer dogs and more children, possibly; fewer flats and more farms; less canned milk (or whatever the paste is) and more real cream. Surely we might buy less and raise more, hire less and make more, travel less and see more, hear less and think more. Life might be quieter for some of us; profounder, perhaps, for others of us,--more inconvenient indeed, for all of us, and yet a thing to be thankful for.