The old socialist did indeed show us what cabinet-making can be.  He turned the office behind the library into a workroom, and from it Sophronisba’s tattered and torn and forlorn old things emerged, piece by piece, in shining rosewood and walnut and mahogany majesty.  If you love old furniture; if it gives you a thrill just to touch a period chair of incomparable grace, or the smooth surface of an old table, or the curve of a carved sofa, you’ll understand Alicia’s open rapture and my more sedate delight.

The tiled fireplace in the library was really the feature of Hynds House.  There wasn’t any mantel:  the fireplace was sunk into the wall, and above it and the book-cases on each side was a space filled with more relics than all the rest of the house contained—­portraits, signed and framed documents, letters, old flags, and a whole arsenal of weapons.  Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Freeman Hynds—­thin, dark, austere, more like a Cameronian Scotsman than a Carolina gentleman of an easy habit of life.

However, it was not portrait or relics that made the room remarkable, but the tiles, each a portrait of a Revolutionary hero.  Laurens, Marion, Lafayette, Pulaski, von Steuben—­there they were in buff and blue, martial, in cocked hats, and with such awe-inspiring noses!  The center and largest tile was, of course, the Father of his Country, without the hat, but with the nose, and above him the original flag, with the thirteen stars for the thirteen weak-kneed little states that were to grow into the great empire of freedom that the high-nosed, high-hearted soldiers fought for and founded.  Alicia and I touched those tiles with reverence.  They were the pride of our hearts.

As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall.  The front one had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside.  So long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in.  The silk quilt on the four-poster was falling to pieces, the linen was as yellow as beeswax, and the sheets made one think of the Flying Dutchman’s sails.  This room was of almost monastic severity:  an ascetic or a stern soldier might have occupied it.  Besides the bed it contained four chairs, a clothes-press, a secretary, and a shaving-stand.  On a small table near the bed were a Wedgwood mortar with a heavy pestle, a medicine glass, and a pewter candlestick turned as black as iron.  The press in the corner still held a few clothes, threadbare and sleazy, and in the desk were some dry letters and a Business Book—­at least, that’s how it was marked—­with lists of names, each having an occupation or task set down opposite it, I suppose the names of long-dead slaves.  On the fly-leaf was written, in a neat and very legible hand, “Freeman Hynds.”

“Sophy!” Alicia’s voice had an edge of awe.  “This must have been his room.  I believe he died here, in this very bed.  And afterward they shut the room up; and it hasn’t been opened until now.”