and side lights, green blind doors outside of the white painted one with its massive brass knocker, and still more unique and impressive, it had for its approach, semi-circular stone steps instead of the usual oblong ones.  The large blocks of granite had been cut so that each of the four steps should be smaller than the one below it; and when, after months of gossip and suspense, they were finally laid in place, their straight edges towards the house and their expensive curved sides to the road, a procession of curious persons in wagons, carryalls, buggies, and gigs wound their way past the premises.  The governor’s “circ’lar steps” brought many pilgrims down the main street of Beulah first and last, and the original Hamiltons had been very proud of them.  Pride (of such simple things as stone steps) had died out of the Hamilton stock in the course of years, and the house had been so long vacant that no one but Lemuel, the Consul, remembered any of its charming features; but Ossian Popham, when he pried up and straightened the ancient landmarks, had much to say of the wonderful steps.

“There’s so much goin’ on now-a-days,” he complained, as he puffed and pried and strained, and rested in between, “that young ones won’t amount to nothin’, fust thing you know.  My boy Digby says to me this mornin’, when I asked him if he was goin’ to the County Fair ’No, Pop, I ain’t goin’,’ he says, ‘it’s the same old fair every year.’  Land sakes! when I was a boy, ’bout once a month, in warm weather, I used to ask father if I could walk to the other end o’ the village and look at the governor’s circ’lar steps; that used to be the liveliest entertainment parents could think up for their young ones, an’ it was a heap livelier than two sermons of a Sunday, each of ’em an hour and fifteen minutes long.”

Digby, a lad of eighteen and master of only one trade instead of a dozen, like his father, had been deputed to paper Mother Carey’s bedroom while she moved for a few days into the newly fitted guest room, which was almost too beautiful to sleep in, with its white satiny walls, its yellow and green garlands hanging from the ceiling, its yellow floor, and its old white chamber set repainted by the faithful and clever Popham.

The chintz parlor, once Governor Weatherby’s study, was finished too, and the whole family looked in at the doors a dozen times a day with admiring exclamations.  It had six doors, opening into two entries, one small bedroom, one sitting room, one cellar, and one china closet; a passion for entrances and exits having been the whim of that generation.  If the truth were known, Nancy had once lighted her candle and slipped downstairs at midnight to sit on the parlor sofa and feast her eyes on the room’s loveliness.  Gilbert had painted the white matting the color of a ripe cherry.  Mrs. Popham had washed and ironed and fluted the old white ruffled muslin curtains from the Charlestown home, and they adorned the four windows.  It was the north room, on the