FORGOTTEN ROADS 167 



fireplaces (two smaller ones on the sides and a huge 

 one behind) of the stone chimney rising out of a 

 rotting mass of bricks, plaster, and woodwork, with 

 nothing else left standing except a portion of one 

 side wall, to the second-story beams, with two win- 

 dow openings still intact. Yes, there was some- 

 thing else! Half against this wall, in what was once 

 a corner of the room, turned gray and furry by 

 the weather, rose the frame of a corner cupboard, the 

 base split away by the collapse of the floor and 

 standing by a seeming miracle, but the fluted pi- 

 lasters on either side, and the connecting cap and 

 cornice, apparently intact. The lower portion of 

 the cupboard had once been inclosed by a door; the 

 upper part had evidently always been open, with 

 four gracefully curved shelves. There it stood, 

 above the mournful ruins, like a gray ghost of the 

 departed domestic life. It seemed almost as if the 

 wraiths of a luster pitcher and a blue-china tea-set 

 would appear upon its shelves. 



We made our way to it, over the debris pile in the 

 cellar hole, and with all the gentleness possible 

 disengaged it from the side wall and the single rotted 

 joist which upheld it at the back. But, in spite 

 of our tenderness, it fell quite to pieces. The 

 carved keystone cap and cornice moldings, rotted 

 by water from above, separated into their com- 

 ponent parts or even disintegrated into a brown 

 powder, leaving scarcely enough for a reconstruc- 

 tion model. The shelves were rotted to a kind of 

 damp punk. Only the fluted side pieces, or 

 pilasters, could ever be used again (with recon- 

 structed capitals). And they are going to be. 



