It sometimes happened that the capacity of the elastic house reached its limit. On one such rare occasion a belated Presbyterian minister alighted at the front gate and walked in with his baggage,--a pair of well-worn saddle-bags. He was warmly welcomed, of course, but the lady of the manor was in despair. Where could he sleep? Every corner was full. One couldn't ask a clergyman to spend the night on a settee in the passageway, nor lie upon a "pallet" of quilts on the parlor floor. The children heard the troubled consultation as to ways and means with their "Mammy," and were full of sympathy for the homeless, unsheltered guest. The situation was still serious when the household was summoned to family prayers. The clergyman--a gaunt specimen with a beaklike nose and mournful voice--launched into the one hundred and second Psalm, pouring out, as the pitying children thought, his own soul in its homeless desolation. When he reached the words, "I am like a pelican in the wilderness: I am like an owl in the desert: I am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop," the exultant voice of the youngest little girl rang out, "_Mamma, he can roost on the tester!_" One cannot wonder at this advice from a hospitable man who had been literally "eaten out of house and home," "I advise my son to keep out of other people's houses, and keep other people out of his own." One can hardly imagine the care and labor involved in so much entertaining. Nobody ever passed a house without calling; nobody ever left it without refreshment for man and beast. Horses and servants attended every visitor. [Illustration: The Kitchen of Mount Vernon.]