avy to be launched. In each room is a chandelier for
gas, resplendent as though Louis XV had come again to life, with tinkling
glass pendants and globules interlinked, like enormous Kohinoors.

Down in the kitchen--which is below stairs as in an old English
comedy--you can see the place where the range stood. And there are smoky
streaks upon the walls that may have come from the coals of ancient
feasts. If you sniff, and put your fancy in it--it is an unsavory
thought--it is likely even that you can get the stale smell from such
hospitable preparation.

From the first floor to the second is a flaring staircase with a landing
where opulence can get its breath. And then there is a choice of upward
steps, either to the right or left as your wish shall direct. And on each
side is a balustrade unbroken by posts from top to bottom. Now the first
excitement of my own life was on such a rail, which seemed a funicular
made for my special benefit. The seats of all my early breeches, I have
been told, were worn shiny thereon, like a rubbed apple. These descents
were executed slowly at the turn, but gathered wild speed on the
straight-away. There was slight need for Annie to dust the "balusters."

An old house is strong in its class distinctions. There is a front part
and a back part. To know the front part is to know it in its spacious and
generous moods. But somewhere you will find a door and there will be three
steps behind it, and poof!--you will be prying into the darker life of the
place. In this particular house of which I write, it was as if the back
rooms, the back halls and the innumerable closets had been playing at hide
and seek and had not been told when the game was over, and so still kept
to their hiding places. It is in such obscure closets that a family
skeleton, if it be kept at all, might be kept most safely. There would be
slight hazard of its discovery if the skeleton restrained itself from
clanking, as is the whim of skeletons.

It was in the back part of this house that I came on a closet, where,
after all these years, women's garments were still hanging. A lighted
match--for I am no burglar with a bull's-eye as you might
suspect--displayed to me an array of petticoats--the flounced kind that
gladdened the eye of woman in those remote days--also certain gauzy
matters which the writers of the eighteenth century called by the name of
smocks. Besides these, there were suspended from hooks those sartorial
dece