When I was your age

by Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

Maud.

at all. They were squeezed into staircase walls, they lurked beside chimneys, they were down near the floor, they were close beneath the ceiling. It was as if a child had built the house for the express purpose of playing hide-and-seek in it. Ah, how we children did play hide-and-seek there! To lie curled up in the darkest corner of the “twisty” cupboard, that went burrowing in under the front stairs,—to lie curled up there, eating an apple, and hear the chase go clattering and thumping by, that was a sensation!

Then the stairs! There was not very much of them, for a tall man standing on the ground floor could touch the top step with his hand. But they had a great deal of variety; no two steps went the same way: they seemed to have fallen out with one another, and never to have “made up” again. When you had once learned how to go up and down, it was very well, except in the dark; and even then you had only to remember that you must tread on the farther side of the first two steps, and on the hither side of the next three, and in the middle of four after, and then you were near the top or the bottom, as the case might be, and could scramble or jump for it. But it was not well for strangers to go up and down those stairs.

There was another flight that was even more perilous, but our father had it boarded over, as he thought it unsafe for any one to use. One always had a shiver in passing through a certain dark passage, when one felt boards instead of plaster under one’s hand, and knew that behind those boards lurked the hidden staircase. There was something uncanny about it,—

“O’er all there hung the shadow of a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted.”

Perhaps the legend of the hidden staircase was all the more awful because it was never told.

Just to the right of the school-room, a door opened into the new part of the house which our father had built. The first room was the great dining-room; and very great it was. On the floor was a wonderful carpet, all in one piece, which was made in France, and had belonged to Joseph Bonaparte, a brother of the great Emperor. In the middle was a medallion of Napoleon and Marie Louise, with sun-rays about them; then came a great circle, with strange beasts on it ramping and roaring (only they roared silently); and then a plain space, and in the corners birds and fishes such as never were seen in air or sea. Yes, that was a carpet! It was here we danced the wonderful dances. We hopped round and round the circle, and we stamped on the beasts and the fishes; but it was not good manners to step on the Emperor and Empress,—one must go round them. Here our mother sang to us; but the singing belongs to another chapter.

The great dining-room had a roof all to itself,—a flat roof, covered with tar and gravel, and railed in; so that one could lie on one’s face and kick one’s heels, pick out white pebbles, and punch the bubbles of tar all hot in the sun.