Work’d by Ann Eliza Hynds
          Ag’d 9 Yrs. 2 Mos., Nov’r, 1757

that had been carefully framed and mounted as a small fire-screen, perhaps for Ann Eliza’s lady mama or proud grandmother.  It was such human and intimate things, the mute mementoes of children who had passed, that made us begin to love Hynds House, for all its bigness and uncanniness and dilapidation.

We did discover one human touch laid upon the place by Sophronisba herself.  She had gathered together a full set of small, hand-colored photographs of Confederate generals, wrapped them in a hand-made Confederate flag, into which was tucked a receipt signed by Judah Benjamin for Hynds silver melted into a bar and given to the Cause, written, “The glory is departed,” across the package, and hidden it.  Alicia, who had a hankering after Confederates, herself, put the photographs in a leather-covered album at least as old as themselves, and kept them sacredly.  She said these were America’s own vanquished and vanished Trojans, and that one got a lump in the throat remembering how

          Fallen are those walls that were so good,
          And corn grows now where Troy town stood.

Schmetz brought us our upholsterer, Riedriech the cabinet-maker, most cunning of craftsmen, who knew all there is to know about old furniture and just what should and shouldn’t be done to it.  In addition he was a grizzled, bearded, shambling old angel who clung to a reeking pipe and Utopian notions, a pestilent and whole-hearted socialist who would call the President of the United States or the president of the Plumbers’ Union “Comrade” equally, and who put propagandist literature in everything but our hair.

“Mr. Riedriech,” you would say reproachfully, “yesterday I discovered Karl Marx and Jean Jaures lurking behind my coffee-pot and Fourier under the butter-dish.  To-day I find Karl Kautsky in ambush behind the cream-jug and Frederick Engels under the rolls.”

Riedriech would regard you paternally, placidly, benevolently, through his large, brass-rimmed spectacles: 

“So?  Little by little the drop of water the granite wears away.  I give you the little leaflet, the little pamphlet, und by and by comes the little hole in your head.”

Thank heaven the doctor next door didn’t hear that!

Alicia knew how to handle the old visionary with innocent but consummate skill.  Looking at the kind old bear with her Irish eyes: 

“It must be a wonderful thing to have such mastery of one’s tools, to know exactly what to do and how to do it,” she would sigh.  “’Tisn’t everybody can be a master craftsman!”

“I show you in a little while what iss cabinet-making!” he said proudly.  “I do more yet by you,” he added charitably, “then make over for you chairs and tables and such, already:  I make over for you your little mind.”