Round at the back, under the wide, open shed, a door led into the kitchen; another led into the living-room; another, into the store-room; 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 store-room, 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. [Illustration: “THE LANTERN FLICKERS, THE MILK FOAMS, THE STORIES FLOW”] For Grandfather in the winter made brooms--the best brooms, I think, that ever were made. The tall broom-corn was grown on the farm in the summer, ripened and cut and seeded, and then, as soon as winter set in, was loomed and wired and sewed into brooms. But the cured and seeded broom-corn was not the main thing, after all, that was brought in for the winter. Behind the stove in the kitchen, stood the sweet-potato box (a sweet potato, you know, must be kept dry and warm). An ample, ten-barrel box it was, fresh-papered like the walls, full of Jersey sweets that _were_ sweet--long, golden, syrupy potatoes, such as grow only in the warm sandy soil of southern New Jersey. Against that big box in Grandmother’s kitchen stood the sea-chest, fresh with the same kitchen 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 “template” 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. 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 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 gas log, the seven children into one or none, or into a little bull-terrier pup. But is it so? No, it is not so--not so of a million homes. For there is many an old-fashioned farmhouse still in the country, and many a new-fashioned city house where there are more human children than little bull-terrier pups.