he opening of Hampton, when, as the story
goes, gay Captain Charles Ridgely, builder of the house, held a card
party in the attic to celebrate the event, while his wife, Rebecca
Dorsey Ridgely, a lady of religious turn, marked the occasion
simultaneously with a prayer-meeting in the drawing room; of the ball
given by the Ridgelys in honor of Charles Carroll's granddaughters, the
exquisite Caton sisters; of hunt meets here, long, long ago, and hunt
balls which succeeded them; of breakneck rides; of love-making in that
garden peopled with the ghosts of more than a century of lovers; of
duels fought at dawn. Of such vague, thrilling tales the old house seems
to whisper.

Never, from the moment we turned into the tree-lined avenue, leading to
Hampton, from the moment when I saw the fox hounds rise resentfully out
of beds which they had dug in drifts of oak leaves in the drive, from
the moment when I stood beneath the stately portico and heard the bars
of the shuttered doors being flung back for our admittance--never, from
my first glimpse of the place, have I been able to dispel the sense of
unreality I felt while there, and which makes me feel, now, that Hampton
is not a house that I have seen, but one built by my imagination in the
course of a particularly charming and convincing dream.

Stained glass windows bearing the Ridgely coat of arms flank the front
doorway, and likewise the opposing doorway at the end of the enormous
hall upon which one enters, and the light from these windows gives the
hall a subdued yet glowing illumination, so that there is something
spectral about the old chairs and the old portraits with which the walls
are solidly covered. There are portraits here by Gilbert Stuart and
other distinguished painters of times gone by, and I particularly
remember one large canvas showing a beautiful young woman in evening
dress, her hair hanging in curls beside her cheeks, her tapering fingers
touching the strings of a harp. She was young then; yet the portrait is
that of the great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother, of present
Ridgelys, and she has lain long in the brick-walled family burying
ground below the garden. But there beneath the portrait stands the harp
on which she played.

One might tell endlessly of paneling, of the delicate carving of mantels
and overmantels, of chairs, tables, desks, and sofas of Chippendale,
Hepplewhite, Phyfe and Sheraton, yet giving such an inventory one might
fail ut