House Garden 
may look out upon the village street, 
dates back to the Revolutionary period, 
while the later portion, broad gabled, 
w'ith wide entrance hall, and a great fanlight 
over the street door, is perhaps fifty years 
younger. 
The wide and hospitable hall is dignified 
with a beautiful old sofa of a rare eighteenth 
century pattern, and three or four of the 
famous Robert Morris chairs, the latter in¬ 
herited from relatives in Philadelphia. In 
one corner of the living-room ticks an old- 
special fancy of those who seek the curious 
in pottery. An object of interest is the 
copper spoon-mould in which the ancestors 
of the family were wont to cast the pewter 
spoons intended for kitchen use. The bed¬ 
rooms are in large part furnished in like 
fashion, and at the top of the house is a 
gigantic high-boy, of rare design and curious 
workmanship. 
This house and its furniture are hardly 
typical of village homes in Delaware, for 
the articles are of unusual interest and 
QUAINT OLD CHINA ON SEMICIRCULAR SIDE TABLE 
fashioned tall clock of a pattern for which 
several Delaware clockmakers had a high 
local reputation. In another corner of the 
same room is one of those quaint semicircular 
Chippendale tables of inlaid mahogany. In 
the parlors are great old mahogany chairs of 
several patterns. 
In the dining-room the sideboard is an 
heirloom nearly a century old. Here, too, 
the walls are hung with excellent examples 
of that patriotic American china dating from 
the early years of the Republic, and now the 
beauty, but there are other such homes in 
small communities throughout the State, and 
there are scores of houses of altogether un¬ 
pretentious people in which similar beautiful 
articles are in daily use. The possessors 
have simply never thought it worth while to 
cast aside their sound old furniture for what 
is newer but not better, and they have thus 
escaped, in the matter of furniture at least, 
the vulgarities of the middle nineteenth 
century period. 
E. N. Vallandigham. 
563 
