FullReads

Many of the old-time fittings and appurtenances are still to be seen. A knocker clings to the front door–a wobbly old knocker, it is true, with one screw gone and part of the plate broken–but still boasting its colonial descent. And there is a half-moon window over the door above it, with little panes of glass held in place by a spidery parasol frame, and supported on spindling columns once painted white. And there is an old lantern in the hall and funny little banisters wreathed about a flight of stairs that twists itself up to the second floor.

The relics–now that I come to think of it–stop here. There was a fine old mantel framing a great open fireplace in the front parlor, before which the Father of His Country toasted his toes or sipped his grog, but it is gone now. Muffles’s bar occupied the whole side of this front room, and the cavity once filled with big, generous logs, blazing away to please the host’s distinguished guests, held a collection of bottles from Muffles’s cellar–a moving cellar, it is true, for the beer-wagon and the grocer’s cart replenished it daily.

The great garden in the rear of the old mansion has also changed. The lines of box and sweet syringa are known only by their roots. The rose-beds are no more, the paths that were woven into long stripes across its grass-plats are overgrown and hardly traceable. Only one lichen-covered, weather-stained seat circling about an old locust-tree remains, and this is on its last legs and needs propping up–or did the last time I saw it. The trees are still there. These old stand-bys reach up their arms so high, and their trunks are so big and straight and smooth, that nothing can despoil them. They will stay there until the end–that is, until some merciless Commissioner runs the line of a city street through their roots. Then their fine old bodies will be drawn and quartered, and their sturdy arms and lesser branches go to feed the fires of some near-by factory.

No ladies of high degree now sip their tea beneath their shade, with liveried servants about the slender-legged tables, as they did in the old days. There are tables, of course–a dozen in all, perhaps, some in white cloths and some in bare tops, bare of everything except the glass of beer–it depends very largely on what one orders, and who orders it–but the servants are missing unless you count Muffles and his stable-boy. Two of these old aristocrats–I am speaking of the old trees now, not Muffles, and certainly not the stable-boy–two giant elms (the same that Washington tied his mare to when they were little)–stand guard on either side of the back porch, a wide veranda of a porch with a honeysuckle, its stem, as thick as your arm, and its scraggy, half-dead tendrils plaited in and out of the palings and newly painted lattice-work.

On Sunday mornings–and this tale begins with a Sunday morning–Muffles always shaved himself on this back porch. On these occasions he was attired in a pair of trousers, a pair of slippers, and a red flannel undershirt.

I am aware that this is not an extraordinary thing for a man living in the country to do on a Sunday morning, and it is not an extraordinary costume in which to do it. It was neither the costume nor the occupation that made the operation notable, but the distinguished company who sat around the operator while it went on.

There was the ex-sheriff–a large, bulbous man with a jet-black mustache hung under his nose, a shirt-collar cut low enough to permit of his breathing, and a skin-tight waistcoat buttoned over a rotundity that rested on his knees. He had restless, quick eyes, and, before his “ex” life began and his avoirdupois gained upon him, restless, quick fingers with steel springs inside of them–good fingers for handling the particular people he “wanted.”