Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/349

Rh necessary in unlocking a door, and at once they were inside the plain little plastered building, “the first meeting-house” in which the settlers of Salem worshipped,  and listened to the preaching of Roger Williams, and  Samuel Skelton, and other early pastors of the First Congregational Church. When a larger building was needed, the little meeting-house was moved away, and was used for  different purposes, even at one time as an inn. It is only within a comparatively short time that it was discovered and saved from destruction. This was what Miss South told the girls, as they turned back toward the Institute.

“They ought to have a rummage sale,” said Brenda, flippantly, as she walked from one glass case to another  in the large exhibition rooms. It certainly was a motley collection,—old dishes, old jewelry, even old shoes and  old bonnets, saved to show the present generation the  kind of things their ancestors had worn. There was one tiny hair trunk that any one of the three girls could have carried in one hand, and the label above it stated that it  had contained the entire wardrobe of a certain young  gentleman on his entrance into Harvard in the middle of  the eighteenth century.

There was old furniture of various styles,—a spinet with yellow keys; there were old samplers still looking fairly fresh, though the fingers that had worked them had  been dust for a century; and finally, there was a case with  dolls and other battered toys that the great-great-grandmothers of the present generation of Salem little girls had  played with.