Some Colonial Furniture of Delaware 
indeed, are but 
newly awake to its 
charm and value ; 
and since the craze 
tor old things 
seized the 
country, scores of 
discarded articles 
have been brought 
from their hiding 
places of dis¬ 
honor, and fur¬ 
bished up tor dis¬ 
play in dining¬ 
room or parlor. 
The reverse pro¬ 
cess is still going 
on, however, for 
the writer has 
watched for the 
last thirty years 
the successive 
steps in the degra¬ 
dation ot as tine 
an old Sheraton 
sideboard as ever 
came from the 
hands of cabinet¬ 
maker. Too large 
tor the modest 
dining-room of its 
owner, it long 
occupied one end 
of a back parlor, 
but was finally 
banished to a 
barnlike summer 
kitchen, where 
dingy and neg¬ 
lected, it shares its fallen estate with a 
decrepit old mahogany dining-table, never 
again to shine beneath the application of 
beeswix, flatiron, and chamois skin. 
Delaware, true to her conservative tradi¬ 
tions, still clings to her old moving day, the 
twenty-fifth of March, once the first of the 
year, and it is on this day that many quaint 
old pieces of furniture come to light. Some 
bit of antique oak or mahogany is apt to 
form part of almost any “moving” as it 
passes along the public road from one farm¬ 
house to another. Even the cabins of the 
colored people house a few articles that 
would stir the 
cupidity of any 
collector. An 
elderly Quaker 
lady at Wilming¬ 
ton recently re¬ 
covered from the 
house of a colored 
family a fine old 
chair which she 
remembered from 
childhood, and for 
which she had 
been patiently 
waiting for more 
than sixty years. 
Such heirlooms 
seldom come into 
the market, for 
they are passed by 
will from hand to 
hand and often 
promised to one 
or another rela¬ 
tive years before 
the death of the 
owner. Occa¬ 
sionally, however, 
the auctioneer is 
called to an old 
homestead and 
its long treasured 
articles pass into 
the hands of 
strangers. An 
escritoire nearly 
two centuries old 
was recently sold 
from a homestead 
in an obscure little village, and the new 
owner, in examining his purchase, discovered 
in a secret drawer the lost will of an earlier 
possessor. 
I have in mind now a spacious and airy 
old homestead in a village of Northern Dela¬ 
ware, where every room has one or more 
pieces of the most graceful old mahogany, 
every article an heirloom dating back for 
many generations. This house, as should be 
the case with such, was not built at one period. 
The older portion, a low structure with 
sloping roof that extends in front so as to 
cover a sheltered porch whence the occupants 
HIGH-BOY NEARLY 'I WO CENTURIES OLD 
562 
