"Salem houses present to you a serene..." - Quote by Alice Morse Earle

“It is plainly evident that, in a country where land was to be had for the asking, fuel for the cutting, corn for the planting and harvesting, and game and fish for the least expenditure of labor, no man would long serve for another, and any system of reliable service indoors or afield must fail.”

“Every day may not be good... but there's something good in every day”

“The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.”

“It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.”

“There's nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with't”

“And to lose the chance to see frigatebirds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach -- why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”

“Every house where love abidesAnd friendship is a guest,Is surely home, and home sweet homeFor there the heart can rest.”

“It is easy to gain a definite notion of the furnishing of colonial houses from a contemporary and reliable source - the inventories of the estates of the colonists.”

“The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”