After a considerable amount of discussion on the subject an informal deputation waited upon the ladies to obtain information on a matter which, it was understood, affected the well-being of the whole community, and which was approaching a stage when a specific pronouncement one way or another was absolutely necessary.
Then it was that the truth was revealed. The maiden ladies had, they confessed, been surreptitiously discussing the putting in of a plate-glass front, and they had come to the conclusion that as they were both old and life at best was uncertain, they should not any longer procrastinate the carrying out of a scheme which the growth of the town and its increasing importance fully warranted, they thought.
It took just four days to fix the new front in its place; but it was the topic of the town for months, and even now you will see an occasional group of town people discussing the innovation and wondering what things are coming to.
The dimensions of the topic were, as I ascertained for my own satisfaction, nine feet broad by seven feet high. This was the premier pas. It led to the extravagance of a sunk letter sign, picked out in gold, an outside lamp, and a spring sun-blind, all of the most conventional pattern, and all to my mind in the condition of the “party in a parlour” in the Wordsworth parody. In short, a charming old house with many features of interest was transformed into a foolish hybrid thing—a single sheet of plate-glass on the ground floor, beneath two pairs of small cottage casements with delightful stone eaves. So prosperity turns out the picturesque or, at least, relegates it to the basement, and so a street with all the charm of past centuries clinging to it is fast becoming commonplace, and strangers driving through it laugh at the feeble attempts to give the commercial air of Harrods to a row of cottages—about as sensible a proceeding as it would be to attempt to assimilate the façade of Hampton Court with that of Hampton's in Pall Mall.
Happily there are still some sixteenth-century eaves left and also some eighteenth-century bow windows—the gentle curved bow of the eighteenth century, not the detestable obtuse-angle things of the mid-nineteenth—and happily the spirit of commercial enterprise does not pervade the entire community. Several of the houses that have been turned into shops contain admirable chimneypieces and panelled rooms, with an occasional fire-back and basket grate. It seems, too, that there must have lived in the place a century or so ago a master workman with a great fancy for decorating chimneypieces after the style of Adam; for in many of the rooms of sixteenth-century houses may be found quite good examples of the early style of Robert Adam. In one house there is a fine parlour decorated throughout in this way.
II.—PRECIOUS PANELLING
Some time ago a mason, while doing some repairs in a room in a very old timbered house, disclosed some oak panelling which probably belonged to the sixteenth century. The news of the discovery went abroad, and a collector of “antiques” in the neighbourhood bought the woodwork for a hundred pounds—far more than it was worth, of course, but that is nothing; the effect of the find and of the sale was disastrous to the occupants of other old houses, for they forthwith summoned masons and carpenters and began pulling down their walls, feeling sure that a hundred pounds' worth of panelling was within their reach. They were all disappointed; for several years had passed before the landlord of the chief hotel—it had once been the county town house of a great local family—found behind the battens which served as the stretchers of the canvas that bore some very common paper in his coffee-room, a long range of oak wainscoting covered with paint. The usual local antiquary made his appearance, and through dilating upon its beauty and abusing the vandalism that had spread those coats of paint upon the oak, induced the landlord to give the order to have the panels “stripped” and made good. He little knew what he had let himself in for! The carpenters and the painters attacked the room with spirit (of turpentine), and for weeks it remained in their hands; for it was found that at least twenty coats of paint were upon the woodwork, and that a great portion of it was only held together by the paint, so that with the removal of this binding medium the panels became splinters.
Before the end of a profitless six weeks the good landlord was wishing with all his heart that that relic of a bygone period had been allowed to rest comfortably buried beneath the papered canvas that had entombed it all. The bill that he had to pay for the restoration was for such a sum as would have been sufficient to buy the same quantity of absolutely new panelling, he explained to some people to whom he went for sympathy! He laid great stress upon the fact that he could actually have got new panelling for the price of repairing the old!