Winter and summer the
hall-door, which had long lost the knocker, lay hospitably open. The
parlor had a very equivocal appearance; for the furniture, though
originally good and of excellent materials, was stained and dinged and
hacked in a manner that denoted but little sense of care or cleanliness.
Many of the chairs, although not worn by age, wanted legs or backs,
evidently from ill-usage alone--the grate was without fire-irons--a
mahogany bookcase that stood in a recess to the right of the fireplace,
with glass doors and green silk blinds, had the glass all broken and
the silk stained almost out of its original color; whilst inside of
it, instead of books, lay a heterogeneous collection of garden seeds
in brown paper--an almanac of twenty years' standing, a dry ink-bottle,
some broken delf, and a large collection of blue-moulded shoes and
boots, together with an old blister of French flies, the lease of their
farm, and a great number of their receipts for rent. To crown all, the
clock in the other recess stood cobwebbed about the top, deprived of the
minute hand, and seeming to intimate by its silence that it had given
note of time's progress to this idle and negligent family to no purpose.
On the drawing-room stairs there lay what had once been a carpet, but
so inseparable had been their connection that the stairs were now worn
through it, and it required a sharp eye to distinguish such fragments
of it as remained from the color of the dirty boards it covered and the
dust that lay on both.
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