Welcome, and do come in. We are Margaret and Lucy, sisters-in-law, and since the spring of 1996 we have run a small tea room on the ground floor of the old Pruett House on Elm Street, two blocks off the square. If you have walked past the yellow Victorian with the wraparound porch and wondered what was inside, it is us, and it is scones.

We serve a proper afternoon tea, the kind with three tiers and a pot that is actually hot, along with soups, salads and finger sandwiches at lunchtime, in four small rooms furnished with the tables and chairs and mismatched china that we have collected between us over a great many years of Saturday estate sales. Nothing matches. Everything is clean. There is no music except the clock in the hall, and there are no televisions anywhere, and we intend to keep it that way.

This page was made for us by Lucy's nephew, who is fourteen and very patient with us. If something on it looks odd, that is our fault and not his.

Served from 1:00 until 4:00, Tuesday through Saturday. Reservations recommended, especially on Saturdays.

Afternoon tea comes on a three-tiered stand and includes:

• A pot of tea of your choosing, from our list of about twenty. Our house blend is a strong Assam and Ceylon mix that Margaret spent a winter getting right. We also have Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Lapsang Souchong for the brave, a good decaffeinated English Breakfast, and herbal blends for those who need them. Milk, lemon, sugar cubes with the little tongs.
• Two scones, warm, one plain and one of the day (see below), with clotted cream, butter and our own strawberry jam.
• Four finger sandwiches: cucumber and dill butter, egg salad with watercress, smoked turkey with cranberry, and a fourth that changes with the season.
• Sweets: a lemon curd tartlet, a piece of shortbread, and a slice of whatever cake Lucy made that morning.

Children's tea (ages 4 to 10) is $7.50 and swaps the cucumber for peanut butter and jam, with cocoa or a very milky tea in a real cup. Little ones are welcome and we have never had one break anything worse than a saucer, and the saucer didn't match anyway.

Please allow an hour and a half. Afternoon tea is not meant to be hurried, and we won't hurry you.

Lunch is served from 11:00 until 2:00. Everything is made in our kitchen the morning it is served. The menu below runs from mid-September until we change it for the holidays.

Prices include the tea room's cloth napkins, which we launder ourselves, and which is why we ask you not to take them home even though we know they are nice.

Every December we decorate the house from the porch to the attic stairs, light the fireplaces in the two front rooms, and serve a special Holiday Tea in place of the regular afternoon tea. It is our favorite month and the one that nearly kills us.

The Holiday Tea is $16.50 per person and includes a pot of our Christmas blend (black tea with orange peel, cinnamon and clove), a cranberry scone and a gingerbread scone, five finger sandwiches, and a plate of holiday sweets: a mince tartlet, a slice of Lucy's Christmas cake, a snowflake sugar cookie and a piece of peppermint bark.

Holiday Teas are served December 1 through December 23, Tuesday through Saturday, at 1:00 and 3:00, by reservation only. We seat about forty people at each sitting, and last year every Saturday and most of the last two weeks were full by the middle of November. If you are thinking of bringing your mother, your sister, your book club, your office, or your daughter's Brownie troop, please do not wait until December to write to us. Send us a note now with the date you'd like, how many, and a second choice.

Groups of ten or more may have the Rose Room to themselves. Gift certificates for a Holiday Tea or an Afternoon Tea are available all year and are, we are told, a very good present for someone who has everything.

The house was built in 1892 for a dry-goods merchant named Pruett, his wife and their six children, which explains the number of small bedrooms upstairs and the size of the kitchen. It stayed in the family until the 1950s, was a boarding house for a time, was cut into apartments in the 1970s, and was standing empty and rather sad when Margaret's husband, who cannot drive past a sagging porch without stopping, bought it in 1994. It took eighteen months to put right. The wraparound porch was rebuilt board by board. The pocket doors between the two front parlors, which had been painted shut, were freed and still run in their tracks. The stained glass at the stair landing is original; the wallpaper in the Rose Room is not, but it is a faithful pattern and we love it.

We serve in the four ground-floor rooms: the two front parlors (the Rose Room and the Blue Room), the dining room, and what was the family's sitting room and is now the Garden Room, which looks out on the back garden and is the warmest in winter and the coolest in summer. Upstairs is not open to the public, except at the Holiday Teas when we open the landing so you can see the window.

If you are interested in the house itself, ask for Margaret. She has the original deed in a frame and will show it to you whether you ask or not.

We are on Elm Street, two blocks north of the square, the yellow house with the green shutters and the porch swing. Parking is on the street and in the small lot behind the house through the alley. The front steps are the only way in, we're afraid; the house is old, and so are the steps, but they are wide and there is a good railing.

Reservations are by e-mail: [email protected]. Please tell us the date, the time, how many, and whether it's lunch or tea, and one of us will write back within a day to confirm. (We read the e-mail in the evening after the dishes, so if you write at noon for that afternoon, we are sorry, we won't see it. Just come; on a weekday we can nearly always find a table.) Parties of six or more, and all Holiday Teas, do need a reservation.

Cash and checks, please. We are old-fashioned about that too.