On every side handsome mahogany double doors led into apartments. Before every door lay a rich Persian rug.
Mrs. Bolton opened a door on the left.
“The picture gallery, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, using her formula, though there was but one lady present.
They entered a long, lofty room lighted from the roof. The walls were hung with many pictures, so dark and dim with age that even the good light failed to make their meanings intelligible to the spectators. Yet these were considered the most valuable in the whole collection, and the housekeeper, with great pride, gave the history of each, in something like this style:
“Martyrdom of St. Stephen, ladies and gentlemen—painted by Leonardo da Vinci, in the year of our Lord 1480, purchased at Milan in 1700 for five thousand guineas, by Ralph d’Anglesea of Anglewood. A very rare picture, no copy of it being in existence.”
Our party looked up and saw in a heavy, gilded frame, about five feet square, a very dark, murky canvas, with a small smirch in the middle—nothing more.
This was only a sample of a score of other priceless paintings, invisible as to forms and unintelligible as to meanings, which the housekeeper introduced to the visitors with much pride in the showing.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the family portraits,” said Mrs. Bolton, passing under a lofty archway adorned by the Anglesea arms, and leading the visitors into another compartment of the same gallery.
“Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a portrait of Kenneth d’Anglesea, year 800; very old.”
Our party looked at it and thought it was “very old”—a long brown smudge crowned with an oval yellow smudge, all in a very dark ground, and supposed to represent a human form—no more.