I remember admiring a fine old cherry book-case in Mr.
Lowell's library at Cambridge, and being told by the poet that it had belonged to his grandfather.

When I spoke of the comparative rarity of such possessions he answered: "Oh, anyone can have his grandfather's furniture if he will wait a hundred years!" Nevertheless, with modern methods of manufacture it is by no means certain that a hundred years will secure possession of the furniture we buy to-day to our grandchildren.

In those early days it was not uncommon, it was indeed the custom, for some one of the men who were called "journeymen cabinet-makers"-- that is, men who had served their time and learned their trade, but had not yet settled down to a fixed place and shop of their own--to take up an abode in the house with the family which had built it, for a year, or even two or three years, carrying on the work in some out-house or dependence, choosing and seasoning the wood, and measuring the furniture for the spaces where it was to stand.
There was a fine fitness in such furnishing; it was as if the different pieces actually grew where they were placed, and it is small wonder that so built and fashioned they should possess almost a human interest.
Direct and special thought and effort were incorporated with the furniture from the very first, and it easily explains the excellences and finenesses of its fashioning.
There is an interesting house in Flushing, Long Island, where such furniture still stands in the rooms where it was put together in 1664, and where it is so fitted to spaces it has filled during the passing centuries, that it would be impossible to carry it through the narrow doors and passages, which, unlike our present halls, were made for the passing to and fro of human beings, and not of furniture.
[Illustration: COLONIAL MANTEL AND ENGLISH HOB-GRATE (SITTING-ROOM IN MRS.

CANDACE WHEELER'S HOUSE)] It is this kind of interest which attaches us to colonial furniture and adds to the value of its beauty and careful adaptation to human convenience.

In the roomy "high boys" which we find in old houses there are places for everything.