There were so many nice, awful things that such a place would be good for. Spurring our jaded fancy with bits from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, we got on famously for a while with a pirates' den. We had a long, low, rakish ship lying in the river just off the tunnel's mouth; black-bearded ruffians, with knives between their teeth, stealing ashore and disappearing within the dark underground passage; the great stone table down there heaped with Spanish gold; good Jamaica rum pouring down wicked throats; the dark tunnels ever echoing the rollicking chorus, "Six men sat on the dead man's chest"—when suddenly it occurred to us that we were somewhat compromising the old colonial grandee, Colonel Byrd. With that we gave the matter up. We quit staring at a closed brick outbuilding with unseeable things down under it, and went on our way. And, as it turned out that we never visited the underground rooms after all, this was as near as we ever came to solving the colonial mystery.
That day, sitting about the fireplace in Colonel Byrd's library, we listened to a pleasant chapter in the story of an old manor-house—the account of the recent restoration of Westover. As in most cases where extensive rehabilitation of colonial homes has been attempted, an interesting part of the work was the opening up of goodly old-time fireplaces that the changing fashions of changing generations had filled in with brick and mortar. Sometimes they had shrunk to the dimensions of a modern grate; sometimes even to that of a stovepipe hole. Indeed, what chronological mile-stones are the various forms of our American fireplaces! As the historic dates grow larger, the fireplaces grow smaller.
Of course Westover never had the hugest of fireplaces. Even when this old home was built, the shrinkage in chimney-pieces had been going on for some time. No longer was most of the side of a room in a blaze. No longer was the flame fed by a backlog so huge that "a chain was attached to it, and it was dragged in by a horse."
How far removed Westover was from the day of such things, is shown by the noted mantelpiece in the drawing-room. Only with the coming of smaller fireplaces came those elaborate mantelpieces. But the great fireplaces of our ancestors yielded slowly, inch by inch, as it were; and something of the goodly proportions they yet had in Colonel Byrd's day, the hammer and chisel have shown at Westover.
If the exquisite Colonel's doubtless exquisite ghost haunts this home, we can imagine his pleasure when, one wintry night, he found reopened this fine old library fireplace, and sat him down to toast his shapely calves (even ghostly, they must yet be shapely) in the genial old-time glow.
Some of the most interesting features of the work of putting an old homestead back into a period from which it has strayed, grow out of the very limitations. At Westover, while conformity to colonial times is carried far, even to the exclusion of rocking-chairs, yet there has been no shrinking from anachronisms that comfort or convenience demand.
Eighteenth century fireplaces may blaze and crackle, and quite imagine themselves to be still heating the old house; but somewhere down below is a twentieth century furnace that is quietly doing most of the work.
And what a shock it must be to the colonial ghosts when they stumble in the dark over great claw feet, cold even as their own; the feet of monstrous hollow things, white and awesome as themselves—the things that moderns call bathtubs!
Over in the kitchen, unfortunately for the picturesque, all has to be modern. There the eighteenth century furnishing breaks down altogether. Not from the glowing heart of the old chimney-place, but from a huge, homely range comes the gastronomic hospitality of present-day Westover.
No devotion to the eighteenth century can bring the colonial kitchen back again; send the roaring blaze up the wide chimney; swing the crane with the great kettle into the glow; and rebuild the quaint row of skillet and gridiron and broiler, perched on their little legs over the hot embers of the old hearthstone.