second floor, where, over the front door, runs a sort of narrow
gallery, something less than twelve feet long, leading to
chambers on either hand. This gallery, of course, is railed; and
so, looking down upon the stairs, and all those landing-places
together, with the main one at bottom, resembles not a little a
balcony for musicians, in some jolly old abode, in times
Elizabethan. Shall I tell a weakness? I cherish the cobwebs
there, and many a time arrest Biddy in the act of brushing them
with her broom, and have many a quarrel with my wife and
daughters about it.

Now the ceiling, so to speak, of the place where you enter the
house, that ceiling is, in fact, the ceiling of the second floor,
not the first. The two floors are made one here; so that
ascending this turning stairs, you seem going up into a kind of
soaring tower, or lighthouse. At the second landing, midway up
the chimney, is a mysterious door, entering to a mysterious
closet; and here I keep mysterious cordials, of a choice,
mysterious flavor, made so by the constant nurturing and subtle
ripening of the chimney's gentle heat, distilled through that
warm mass of masonry. Better for wines is it than voyages to the
Indias; my chimney itself a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a
November day is as good for an invalid as a long season spent in
Cuba. Often I think how grapes might ripen against my chimney.
How my wife's geraniums bud there! Bud in December. Her eggs,
too--can't keep them near the chimney, an account of the
hatching. Ah, a warm heart has my chimney.

How often my wife was at me about that projected grand
entrance-hall of hers, which was to be knocked clean through the