Dr. Corliss looked around with a chuckle. “Hello!” he cried. “Here are a lot of the old relics I remember so well seeing when I was a boy, visiting Aunt Nan in the summer-time. Yes, there’s the old matchlock over the door; and here’s the fire-bucket, and the picture of[4] George Washington’s family. I expect Aunt Nan didn’t change anything here in all the thirty years since she let any of her relatives come to see her. Yes, there’s the wax fruit in the glass jar—just as toothsome as ever! There’s the shell picture she made when she was a girl. My! How well I remember everything!”

[4]

They moved from room to room of the old house, flinging open the blinds and letting fresh air and sunshine in upon the strange furniture and decorations. Mrs. Corliss looked about with increasing bewilderment. How was she ever to make this strange place look like their home? Aunt Nan and her queer ways seemed stamped upon everything.

“It’s a funny collection of things, Owen!” she laughed to her husband. “All this furniture is mine, I suppose, according to Aunt Nan’s will. But I am glad we have some things of our own to bring and make it seem more like a truly home. Otherwise I should feel, as Mary says, as if we were living in a kind of museum.”

“We can change it as much as we like, by and by,” her husband reassured her.

“What a funny old lady Great-Aunt Nan must have been, Daddy!” said John, who had been examining a hooked rug representing a blue[5] cat chasing a green mouse. “Did she make this, do you think?”

[5]

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Corliss. “I remember seeing her working at it. She hooked all these rugs. It was one of her favorite amusements. She was strange enough, I believe. I can remember some of the weird things she used to do when I was a lad. She used to put on a man’s coat and hat and shovel coal or snow like any laborer. She was always playing tricks on somebody, or making up a game about what she happened to be doing. We must expect surprises and mysteries about the house as we come to live here. It wouldn’t be Aunt Nan’s house without them.—Hello!”

John had sat down on a little three-legged stool in the corner; and suddenly he went bump! on the floor. The legs of the stool had spread as if of their own accord and let him down.

“That was one of Aunt Nan’s jokes, I remember!” laughed Dr. Corliss. “Oh, yes! I got caught myself once in the same way when I was a boy.”

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