A wide staircase leads from the hall to the second story, which is arranged much like the first.

Over this is the garret.

I needn't tell a New England boy what--a museum of curiosities is the garret of a well-regulated New England house of fifty or sixty years' standing.
Here meet together, as if by some preconcerted arrangement, all the broken-down chairs of the household, all the spavined tables, all the seedy hats, all the intoxicated-looking boots, all the split walking-sticks that have retired from business, "weary with the march of life." The pots, the pans, the trunks, the bottles--who may hope to make an inventory of the numberless odds and ends collected in this bewildering lumber-room?
But what a place it is to sit of an afternoon with the rain pattering on the roof! What a place in which to read Gulliver's Travels, or the famous adventures of Rinaldo Rinaldini! My grandfather's house stood a little back from the main street, in the shadow of two handsome elms, whose overgrown boughs would dash themselves against the gables whenever the wind blew hard.

In the rear was a pleasant garden, covering perhaps a quarter of an acre, full of plum-trees and gooseberry bushes.

These trees were old settlers, and are all dead now, excepting one, which bears a purple plum as big as an egg.
This tree, as I remark, is still standing, and a more beautiful tree to tumble out of never grew anywhere.