comfortable, brought from France in 1796, as a bedstead for a student in Columbia College, David Codwise, a collateral kinsman. In a spirit that proved the relationship, he condemned the couch as "altogether too luxurious," and slept during the period of his tutelage on a plank laid upon two chairs.

All the "plenishing" of the house is from ninety to two hundred years old, the more modern having been brought from her girlhood's home by Mrs. Smith over eighty years ago. The drawing-room carpet was sent from Brussels in 1807, to Margaret Evertson, wife of Governor Smith. It is whole throughout, and the colors are clear and harmonious. So extraordinary is this immunity from darn and dimness that the story of the actual age of the venerable fabric seems incredible to those accustomed to the "often infirmities" of modern floor-coverings.

The bookcase in this room was "brought over" by a Holland Evertson, in 1640. The valuable Venetian mirror belongs to a still earlier date.

A superb silver tray, bearing the changed crest of Robert Livingston, with the motto "Spero meliora," adopted in commemoration.

of his escape from shipwreck, is one of the Smith heirlooms, an inheritance through beautiful Helen Livingston.

The kitchen chimney had, within thirty years, a throat ten feet wide by five high. Standing within it, Mrs. Smith's children used to peep up at the stars at night. The whole chimney is twelve feet square.

In Miss H. E. Smith's charming tale, For Her King's Sake, we read how a Royalist girl, the ward of Madam Smith, hid two Hessian prisoners in the "smoke-room," made by a cavity of this chimney in the second story.

The rear wall, where the kitchen wing joins the newer building, is fifty inches thick. The kitchen is a spacious, delightful chamber, thirty-two feet long by twenty-eight wide.

Passing the door of a quaintly beautiful bedroom, where a sampler map of the State of New York, wrought in faded silks, hangs over the mantel, and a mourning-piece of "a lady and urn" upon another wall; where the fourposter with carved uprights and head-board is hung with white dimity, as are the deep windows looking down through magnificent elms upon the extensive lawn and gardens,-we climb the stairs to the great garret. A large

round window, like an eye, is set in the gable; the roof slopes above a vast space, where the townspeople used to congregate for dance, and speech-making, and church " entertainments," before a public hall was built. Treasures of antique furniture are here that leave to the wise in such matters no hope of keeping, for the fraction of a minute longer, that clause of the tenth commandment covering "anything that is thy neighbor's"; and in the middle of the dusky spaciousness, a long, long table, over which is cast a white cloth.

"Family papers! all of them. Some day I shall begin—in some years I may complete— the examination of them," says Miss Smith, lifting a corner of what is to me, now that I know what is beneath, the sheet covering the face of the dead.

Hampers, corded boxes, and trunks full of them! The hopes, the dreads, the loves, the lives of nine generations of one blood and

name.