So this was Northern hospitality! This a Northern gentleman's home, with
its cobwebbed ceiling, its little window-panes opaque with stain of rain
and dust, its carpetless floors innocent of wax, littered with odds and
ends--here a battered riding-cane; there a pair of tarnished spurs;
yonder a scarlet hunting-coat a-trail on the banisters, with skirts all
mud from feet that mayhap had used it as a mat in rainy weather!

I leaned forward and picked up the riding-crop; its cane end was capped
with heavy gold. The spurs I also lifted for inspection; they were
beautifully wrought in silver.

Faugh! Here was no poverty, but the shiftlessness of a sot, trampling
good things into the mire!

I looked into the fireplace. Ashes of dead embers choked it; the
andirons, smoke-smeared and crusted, stood out stark against the sooty
maw of the hearth.

Still, for all, the hall was made in good and even noble proportion;
simple, as should be the abode of a gentleman; over-massive, perhaps,
and even destitute of those gracious and symmetrical galleries which we
of the South think no shame to take pride in; for the banisters were
brutally heavy, and the rail above like a rampart, and for a newel-post
some ass had set a bronze cannon, breech upward; and it was green and
beautiful, but offensive to sane consistency.

Standing, the better to observe the hall on all sides, it came to me
that some one had stripped a fine English mansion of fine but ancient
furniture, to bring it across an ocean and through a forest for the
embellishment of this coarse house. For there were pictures in frames