The fireplaces in the front rooms were of the same pattern, but smaller than that in the kitchen. Fires were seldom built there except at weddings, funerals, or on state occasions. The furniture, for the most part home-made, rude and unpainted, was scanty--a few stools, benches, and split-bottomed chairs; a table or two, plain chests, rude, low bedsteads, with home-made ticks filled with straw or pine needles. The best room may have had a carved oak chest, brought from England, a tent or field bedstead, with green baize, or white dimity curtains, and generous feather bed. The stout tick for this, the snow-white sheets, the warm flannel blankets, and heavy woollen rugs, woven in checks of black, or red, and white, or the lighter harperlet, were all the products of domestic wheel and loom. There were no carpets. The floors were sprinkled with fine, white sand, which, on particular occasions, was brushed into fanciful patterns with a birch broom, or bundle of twigs. The style of painting floors called "marbling," hardly yet extinct, was a survival of this custom. The finishing of the "Indian House" was more elaborate than that of the Smead house; but there was no lath and plaster, the ceiling being the same. The partitions and walls were of wainscot-work, with mouldings about the doors and windows. These mouldings were all cut by hand from solid wood. In some cases the oak summer-tree was smoothed and left bare, with a capital cut on the supporting posts; generally, hereabouts, it was covered with plain boards,--it may be, in the best room, with panels. No finer lumber is found than that with which these old houses were finished. Their massive frames, each stout tenon fitted to its shapely mortise by the try rule, whose foundations were laid by our sires so long ago that the unsubdued savage still roamed in the forest where its timbers were hewn, stand as firmly as when the master-builder dismissed the tired neighbors, who had heaved up the huge beams, and pinned the last rafter to its mate (for there were no ridgepoles) at the raising. AN EVENING AT HOME.