238 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



them; the legends about the most conspicuous, their 

 memorable speeches and acts, down to the names of their 

 very dolls, and their legends also, which, of course, 

 recurred again and again in the family fantasy. Every 

 tree and field and gate and room was connected with 

 some one of the dear and beauteous or brave dead, with 

 their birth, their deeds, their ends. 



The portraits of many of them, at least one to every 

 generation, hung on the walls, and it was curious to 

 notice, what never any one of them could see, except the 

 granddaughter, the progress and the decline from genera- 

 tion to generation. The earliest of all had sailed and 

 buccaneered with Henry Morgan, a great lover and de- 

 stroyer of life. It was from him that the expression and 

 air of them all had descended. Love and battle had 

 carved his face. Out from behind his bold but easy face 

 peered a prophetic pitifulness, just as behind the loaded 

 brown clouds of drifting storm peers the innocence of 

 blue, and upon it white clouds that are thin and waved 

 like an infant's hair. Upon this model his descendants' 

 faces had been carved, not by love and battle, but by his 

 might alone. Even the tender women flaunted it. It 

 nestled, an eagle, among the old man's snows; it pos- 

 sessed the little child, and he had nothing but the face 

 of the buccaneer, like an eaglet in a cage. 



A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of 

 life. If it only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our 

 days. It beholds our sorrows and our joys; its untale- 

 bearing walls know all our thoughts, and if it be such 

 a house as grows after the builders are gone, our thoughts 

 presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a 

 certain shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to 



