48 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



a variety of styles and periods, and with so princely a 

 gesture of impartial munificence^ that the spectator, 

 transported by this generous display and superiority 

 to the anthological principle, could but exclaim he 

 nothing common did or mean upon this memorable 

 scene. Among the infinite riches in this little room 

 were massy sideboards and " escritoires " and mirrors 

 and tables and chairs and fern-stands of sham oak 

 elaborately carved and ornamented. One good cane 

 chair and one good mirror stood making wry and self- 

 conscious faces at one another amid the motley, and 

 I admired the discrimination which could bring baseness 

 and virtue into such close relations as to put a premium 

 upon the charms of the latter. On the mantelpiece, old 

 Sheffield candlesticks rubbed shoulders with china plates 

 printed with Dana Gibson vignettes and large earthen- 

 ware figures modelled from Pears' Soap originals. A huge 

 sideboard of sham oak (carved and gilt) was heaped 

 with plated cheer old brass and pewter, ash-trays, 

 sauceboats, old willow-pattern ware, etc., side by side 

 with china vases and lidded pots in the " Present from 

 Margate " manner. On the walls were portraits of 

 music-hall entertainers and hair-tonic women, hunting 

 scenes, antlers, and the glass-eyed birds grotesquely 

 posed there in their faded plumage, and to their originals 

 what the doggerel of an advertisement of boot-blacking 

 is to a lyric of Dekker's. 



The woman of the house was worthy of her household 

 effects. Flesh and blood she may have been, but I saw 

 nothing but a clockwork statue for movement and a 

 mechanism for a voice an inflexible voice with no ups 

 and downs in its career, but plodding along an endless, 

 flat desert of correct utterance, with never a bush nor 

 pool of water. She hardly thought her house, which 

 received only " the best people," was suitable for the 

 likes of me. Ah, dear lady, thought I, your anxiety 

 to get rid of me does not, cannot equal mine to escape 

 your cemetery and you, poor victim of a sacrifice of which 

 you know nothing, but for which all of us of this genera- 

 tion and the ghosts of the past one are responsible and 

 accountable ! 



