They never liked him entirely; he in turn had so little regard for them
and their pretensions that, when they came, he would suffer none of them
to markedly avoid or affront the Brant squaw, whom indeed they had often
to meet as an associate and equal. Yet this bold, independent, really
great man, so shrewdly strong in his own attitude toward these gilded
water-flies, was weak enough to rear his own son to be one of them, to
value the baubles they valued, to view men and things through their
painted spectacles--and thus to come to grief.

Two years after Johnson Hall was built, Mr. Stewart all at once decided
that he too would have a new house; and before snow flew the handsome,
spacious "Cedars," as it was called, proudly fronted the Valley highway.
Of course it was not, in size, a rival of the Hall at Johnstown, but it
none the less was among the half-dozen best houses in the Mohawk Valley,
and continued so to be until John Johnson burned it to the ground fifteen
years later. It stood in front of our old log structure, now turned over
to the slaves. It was of two stories, with lofty and spacious rooms, and
from the road it presented a noble appearance, now that the old stockade
had given place to a wall of low, regular masonry.

With this new residence came a prodigious change in our way of life. Daisy
was barely twelve years old, but we already thought of her as the lady of
the house, for whom nothing was too good. The walls were plastered, and
stiff paper from Antwerp with great sprawling arabesques, and figures of
nymphs and fauns chasing one another up and down with ceaseless, fruitless
persistency, was hung upon them, at least in the larger rooms. The floors
were laid smoothly, each board lapping into the next by a then novel
joiner's trick.

On the floor in Daisy's room there was a carpet, too, a rare and