That old woman would as lief have had what remained of her teeth pulled out as have parted with anything once brought into Hynds House.  She preserved everything, good, bad, indifferent.  You’d find luster cider jugs, maybe a fine toby, old Chinese ginger jars, and the quaintest of Dutch schnapps bottles, cheek by jowl with an iron warming-pan, a bootjack, a rusty leather bellows, and a box packed with empty patent-medicine bottles, under the pantry shelf.  A helmet creamer would be full of little rolls of twine, odd buttons, a wad of beeswax, a piece of asafetida, elastic bands, and corks.  She had used a Ridgway platter with a view of the Hudson River on it, as a dinner plate for her hound, for we found it wrapped up, with “Nipper’s platter” scrawled on the paper.

By and large, it wasn’t an easy task to renovate a brick barracks finished in 1735, and occupied for ninety-nine years by a lady of Sophronisba’s parts; though I sha’n’t tell how we had to tackle it room by room, nor of the sweating hours spent in, so to speak, separating the sheep things from the goat things.  I can’t help stopping for a minute, though, to gloat over the front drawing-room that presently emerged, with a cleaned carpet that proved to be a marvel of hand-woven French art, rosewood sofas and chairs upholstered in royal blue and rubbed to satiny-browny blackness, two gloriously inlaid tables, and a Venetian mirror between two windows.

We gave the place of honor on the white marble mantel to a porcelain painting Alicia found in a work-box—­the picture of a woman in gray brocade sprigged with pink-and-blue posies, a lace fichu about her slim shoulders, and a cap with a rose in it covering her parted brown hair.  The little boy leaning against her knees had darker blue eyes, and fairer hair pushed back from a bold and manly forehead.  The painting was about the size of a modern cabinet photograph, and, though pleasing and spirited, was evidently the work of a gifted amateur.  What gave it potent meaning and appeal was the inscription lettered on the back: 

Mrs. Lydia Hariott Hynds & Rich’d.  Hynds Ag’d 7
Paint’d for Col’nl.  J.H.  Hynds by his
Affec.  Neece Jessamine

You couldn’t help loving him, the little “Richard Ag’d 7.”  There was that in the face which won you instantly; it was so clear-eyed, so gallant, so brave, so honest.  So we gave him and his pretty, meek mother the place of honor in the room that had once heard his laughter and seen her tears.  And we brought down-stairs the fine painting of Colonel James Hampden, who was the splendid colonial in claret-color that we had so much admired, and hung him and a smaller painting marked, “Jessamine, Aged 22” where they could look down on those two.

These were the only pictures allowed in that room, and they gave to it an atmosphere flavored most sweetly of yesterday.  Indeed, I think they must have approved of the room altogether, for we hadn’t changed so much as we’d restored it.  Even the glass shades that use’d to shield their wax candles were in their old places.  There was their old-world atmosphere of stateliness; their Chinese jars, their English vases, their beautiful old Chelsea figures; and the sampler so painstakingly