The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money to live up to them.

The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a succession of "girls" left on account of the milking, and the lane was useful as an approach to the backyard by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter.

It was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison often declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there.
It did not stop there.

Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece.

She had an icehouse and a wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not one of them was in order.