They moved toward the cellar entrance in a slow procession, to keep
the chip from flaring out.

"Don't hang to me so!" Grandma Padgett remonstrated with her
daughter. "I sh'll step on you, and down we'll all go and set the
house afire."

Garrets are cheerful, cobwebby places, always full of slits where
long, smoky sun-rays can poke in. An amber warmth cheers the darkness
of garrets; you feel certain there is nothing ugly hiding behind the
remotest and dustiest box. If rats or mice inhabit it, they are
jovial fellows. But how different is a cellar, and especially a
cellar neglected. You plunge down rough steps into a cavern. A mouldy
air from dried-up and forgotten vegetables meets you. The earth may
not be moist underfoot, but it has not the kind feeling of sun-warmed
earth. And if big rats hide there, how bold and hideous they are!
There are cool farmhouse cellars floored with cement and shelved with
sweet-smelling pine, where apple-bins make incense, and swinging-shelves
of butter, tables of milk crocks, lines of fruit cans and home-made
catsup bottles, jars of pickles and chowder, and white covered pastry
and cake, promise abundant hospitality. But these are inverted garrets,
rather than cellars. They are refrigerators for pure air; and they keep
a mellow light of their own. When you go into one of them it seems as
if the house were standing on its head to express its joy and comfort.

But the Susan House cellar was one of dread, aside from the noise
proceeding out of it. Bobaday knew this before they opened a door
upon a narrow-throated descent.