The cosy "settin'-room," with a "pie closet" and an upper tiny cupboard known as a "rum closet" and its pretty fire place--bricked up, but capable of being rescued from such prosaic "desuetude"; a large sunny dining-room, with a brick oven, an oven suggestive of brown bread and baked beans--yes, the baked beans of my childhood, that adorned the breakfast table on a Sunday morning, cooked with just a little molasses and a square piece of crisp salt pork in center, a dish to tempt a dying anchorite.
There wore two broad landings on the stairs, the lower one just the place for an old clock to tick out its impressive "Forever--Never--Never--Forever" a la Longfellow.

Then the long "shed chamber" with a wide swinging door opening to the west, framing a sunset gorgeous enough to inspire a mummy.

And the attic, with its possible treasures.
There was also a queer little room, dark and mysterious, in the center of house on the ground floor, without even one window, convenient to retire to during severe thunder storms or to evade a personal interview with a burglar; just the place, too, for a restless ghost to revisit.
Best of all, every room was blessed with two closets.
Outside, what rare attractions! Twenty-five acres of arable land, stretching to the south; a grand old barn, with dusty, cobwebbed, hay-filled lofts, stalls for two horses and five cows; hen houses, with plenty of room to carry out a long-cherished plan of starting a poultry farm.
The situation, too, was exceptional, since the station from which I could take trains direct to Boston and New York almost touched the northern corner of the farm, and nothing makes one so willing to stay in a secluded spot as the certainty that he or she can leave it at any time and plunge directly into the excitements and pleasures which only a large city gives.
What charmed me most of all was a tiny but fascinating lakelet in the pasture near the house; a "spring-hole" it was called by the natives, but a lakelet it was to me, full of the most entrancing possibilities.
It could be easily enlarged at once, and by putting a wind-mill on the hill, by the deep pool in "Chicken Brook" where the pickerel loved to sport, and damming something, somewhere, I could create or evolve a miniature pond, transplant water lilies, pink and white, set willow shoots around the well-turfed, graveled edge, with roots of the forget-me-not hiding under the banks their blue blossoms; just the flower for happy lovers to gather as they lingered in their rambles to feed my trout.

And there should be an arbor, vine-clad and sheltered from the curious gaze of the passers-by, and a little boat, moored at a little wharf, and a plank walk leading up to the house.

And--and oh, the idealism possible when an enthusiastic woman first rents a farm--an "abandoned" farm! It may be more exact to say that my farm was not exactly "abandoned," as its owner desired a tenant and paid the taxes; say rather depressed, full of evil from long neglect, suffering from lack of food and general debility.
As "abandoned farms" are now a subject of general interest, let me say that my find was nothing unusual.