In the kitchen of the typical old-time New England cottage the homely food of the descendants of the Pilgrims was served,—brown bread and baked beans, pumpkin pies, doughnuts and cheese, home-made relishes. The waiters were dressed in colonial costumes, and sometimes wore calashes. The reception-room of the house was furnished after the manner of the Plymouth Colony. [Illustration: NEW ENGLAND KITCHEN.] The Marlowes were made welcome here, and used to take their suppers in the kitchen, after becoming foot-weary. When the supper was over, they would linger among the New England people, who daily gathered here, and relate colonial wonder-tales. One of these tales well fitted the unique room. It was told by Mr. Marlowe, and we give it here:— THE OLD COACH DOG, OR, THE PHANTOM INN. The scene to which we introduce the reader on this Thanksgiving Eve was in the old Winslow house at Green Harbor, now Marshfield, Mass. No house in America, we may safely say, ever had so many colonial legends of Thanksgiving Day as this. “Silas,” said I, one night to an old stage-driver, “tell us the story of the dog that said ‘Silas!’” The company eagerly demanded the tale. It was a strange room. In one corner were bushel baskets heaped with corn. Uncle Silas shelled corn, as he said, “for company,” on other than holiday or Sunday evenings. Over the corn baskets were strings of dried apples, pumpkins, and red peppers. Near the fireplace were rennets of cheese, and under the rafters were candle-poles. The fireplace revealed great fore-sticks, apple-tree wood, which made an especially hot fire, and was used on Thanksgiving Eves, and at special times. Apples in rows were toasting on the hot hearth. The family consisted of an old couple, named White, and their sons and sons’ wives and children from towns near Boston, and a few invited guests. Uncle Silas caught up his chair and lifted it in the jumping way of the old colonial time to a place nearer the fire. A shutter banged, and he cast his eyes mysteriously toward the window. The room grew very still. “The clouds are scudding over the moon,” he began,—and I will tell the tale as he told it, as nearly as I remember,—“the wind is rising—I can hear it in the tops of the trees. Many’s the time I have gone down in the old stage-coach on nights like this, and leaped from the seat and snatched the mail-bag from the boot, and when I said ‘Silas,’ there would creep out of the boot that old coach dog. “That dog was given to me by a sailor, who was about to go to sea from the old North River. He was a pup then. “I never knew a dog that seemed to think so much of his master as that dog did of me. His eyes were never off of me.