II
Mrs. Apperthwaite's was a commodious old house, the greater part of it
of about the same age, I judged, as its neighbor; but the late Mr.
Apperthwaite had caught the Mansard fever of the late 'Seventies, and
the building-disease, once fastened upon him, had never known a
convalescence, but, rather, a series of relapses, the tokens of which,
in the nature of a cupola and a couple of frame turrets, were
terrifyingly apparent. These romantic misplacements seemed to me not
inharmonious with the library, a cheerful and pleasantly shabby
apartment down-stairs, where I found (over a substratum of history,
encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey's Lady's
Book, an early edition of Cooper's works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay,
Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the
elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac; Clarissa, Lalla
Rookh, The Alhambra, Beulah, Uarda, Lucile, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ben-Hur,
Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were
novels about those delicately tangled emotions experienced by the
supreme few; and stories of adventurous royalty; tales of "clean-limbed
young American manhood;" and some thin volumes of rather precious verse.
'Twas amid these romantic scenes that I awaited the sound of the
lunch-bell (which for me was the announcement of breakfast), when I
arose from my first night's slumbers under Mrs.
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