ked at the
chairs, he offered me two thousand dollars for them. Of course, as I
had been directed by your father to keep everything as the Colonel had
it, I just laughed at him. You see, sir, they have the three feathers,
and are beautifully carved, otherwise. And, here, is a lowboy, with the
shell and the fluted columns, and the cabriole legs, carved on the
knees, and the claw and ball feet. He offered two hundred dollars for
it. And this sofa, with the lion's claw and the eagle's wing, he wanted
to buy it, too. In fact, sir, he wanted to buy about everything in the
house--including the portraits. There are two by Peale and one by
Stuart--here are the Peales, sir--the lady in white, and the young
officer in Continental uniform; and this is the Stuart--the gentleman
in knee breeches and velvet coat. I think he is the same as the one in
uniform, only later in life. They are the Colonel's grandparents, sir:
Major Daniel Duval, of the Tenth Maryland Line, and his wife; she was a
Miss Paca--you know the family, of course, sir. The Major's commission,
sir, hangs in the hall, between the Colonel's own and his father's--he
was an officer in the Mexican war, sir. It was a fighting family, sir,
a fighting family--and a gentle one as well. 'The bravest are the
tenderest, the loving are the daring.'"

There was enough of the South Carolinian of the Lowlands in Croyden,
to appreciate the Past and to honor it. He might not know much
concerning Hepplewhite nor the beauty of his lines and carving, and he
might be wofully ignorant of his own ancestors, having been bred in a
State far removed from their nativity, for he had never given a thought
to the old things, whether of furniture or of forebears--they were of
the inanimate; his world had to do only with the living and what was
incidental to it. The Eternal Now was the Fetich and the God of
Northumberland, all it knew and all it lived for--and he, with every
one else, had worshipped at its shrine.

It was different here, it seemed! and the spirit of his long dead
mother, with her heritage of aristocratic lineage, called to him,
stirring him strangely, and his appreciation, that was sleeping and not
dead, came slowly back to life. The men in buff-and-blue, in
small-clothes, in gray, the old commissions, the savour of the past
that clung around them, were working their due. For no man of culture
and refinement--nay, indeed, if he have but their veneer--can stand in
the presence of a