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46]
Let us go down to the ground floor.
I should have begun with this, but that the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently told in a most interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our local history.
I retain my doubts about those ‘dents’ on the floor of the right-hand room, ‘the study’ of successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental militia's firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in childhood laid them to. That military consultations were held in that room, when the house was General Ward's headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other men of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that Warren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon went forth from the western door and prayed for God's blessing on the men just setting forth on their bloody expedition,—all these things have been told, and perhaps none of them need be doubted.
It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by such recollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality.
