Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

[58] great fireplaces-one altered to contain the most enormous cooking stove ever beheld; the other legs altered, and with six great legs of bacon hanging in its wide embrace. Mariana turned out an elderly are kindly Irish woman, who soon evoked a mistress, the tartest and most precise of Yankees, who turned an ear less deaf than indignant to our urgent entreaties to have our tea in the kitchen and fairly ordered us off. A nice tea at last appeared, we meanwhile lingering in the bar-room with the hostler, who turned out a wag and one or two queer old people who still cluster round the fire and mourn for the desolation wrought by railroads and the Maine Law. On my remarking the fitness of the large hall for dancing purposes, the lumbering hostess said, with a sort of sigh, “Folks don't dance now,” and declared their only patronage to be when “once in a while a fellar comes and knocks at the door and wants to know if we'll tell him how far it is to Worcester.” And many other such touches of solid humor. I was glad I was not to give a Temperance Lecture there; her dry pathos would have left me dumb. I pitied the ancient landlord, confined upstairs with gout, and dreaming of bygone glories, when stages put up at the Holden Tavern and every room was full. Before departing I made one more visit to the antique kitchen, but failed to propitiate the guardian Dragon. I think her surliness, however, rather enhanced our enjoyment; we ate an immense tea for the good of the house and rode home in the cold with great satisfaction, which has not yet passed away.