When a daughter of Sir William Pepperell married Nathaniel Sparhawk, he had a paper specially made, with the fair lady and her happy lover as the principal figures, and a hawk sitting on a spar. This paper is still to be seen in the Sparhawk house at Kittery Point, Maine.
Portsmouth is rich in treasures, but a member of one of the best families there tells me it is very hard to get access to these mansions. Curiosity seekers have committed so many atrocities, in the way of stealing souvenirs, that visitors are looked upon with suspicion.
A house built in 1812 at Sackett's Harbor, New York, has a contemporary paper with scenes which are Chinese in character, but the buildings have tall flag staffs which seem to be East Indian.
Near Hoosic Falls, New York, there used to be a house whose paper showed Captain Cook's adventures. The scenes were in oval medallions, surrounded and connected by foliage. Different events of the Captain's life were pictured, including the cannibals' feast, of which he was the involuntary central figure. This paper has been destroyed, and I have sought in vain for photographs of it. But I have seen some chintz of the same pattern, in the possession of Miss Edith Morgan of Aurora, New York, which was saved from her grandfather's house at Albany when it was burned in 1790. So the paper is undoubtedly of the eighteenth century. Think of a nervous invalid being obliged to gaze, day after day, upon the savages gnawing human joints and gluttonizing over a fat sirloin!
The adventures of Robinson Crusoe were depicted on several houses, and even Mother Goose was immortalized in the same way.
The managers of a "Retreat" for the harmlessly insane were obliged first to veil with lace a figure paper, and finally to remove it from the walls, it was so exciting and annoying to the occupants of the room. This recalls the weird and distressing story by Elia W. Peattie, The Yellow Wall-Paper. Its fantastic designs drove a poor wife to suicide. Ugh! I can see her now, crawling around the room which was her prison.
I advise any one, who is blessed or cursed with a lively imagination, to study a paper closely several times before purchasing, lest some demon with a malignant grin, or a black cat, or some equally exasperating face or design escape notice until too late. I once had a new paper removed because the innocent looking pattern, in time of sleepless anxiety, developed a savage's face with staring eyes, a flat nose, the grossest lips half open, the tongue protruding, and large round ear-rings in ears that looked like horns! This, repeated all round my sick room, was unendurable.
But the old time papers are almost uniformly inspiring or amusing. What I most enjoy are my two papers which used to cover the huge band-boxes of two ancient dames, in which they kept their Leghorn pokes, calashes, and quilted "Pumpkin" hoods. One has a ground of Colonial yellow, on which is a stage-coach drawn by prancing steeds, driver on the top, whip in hand, and two passengers seen at the windows. A tavern with a rude swinging sign is in the background. The cover has a tropical scene—two Arabs with a giraffe. The other band-box has a fire engine and members of the "hose company," or whatever they called themselves, fighting a fire.
Papers with Biblical themes were quite common. In the fascinating biography of Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I find a detailed account of one. She says:
"When we reached Schenectady, the first city we children had ever seen, we stopped to dine at the old 'Given's Hotel,' where we broke loose from all the moorings of propriety on beholding the paper on the dining-room wall illustrating, in brilliant colors, some of the great events in sacred history. There were the patriarchs with flowing beards and in gorgeous attire; Abraham, offering up Isaac; Joseph, with his coat of many colors, thrown into a pit by his brethren; Noah's Ark on an ocean of waters; Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea; Rebecca at the well; and Moses in the bulrushes.