"Well," he replied, "it has been so long since you all had any coffee, and I made out very well on water, when I thought how black mammy missed her coffee, and how glad she would be to get it."
CHAPTER VI.
The antiquity of the furniture in our homes can scarcely be described, every article appearing to have been purchased during the reign of George III., since which period no new fixtures or household utensils seemed to have been bought.
The books in our libraries had been brought from England almost two hundred years before. In our own library there were Hogarth's pictures, in old worm-eaten frames; and among the literary curiosities, one of the earliest editions of Shakespeare (1685) containing under the author's picture the lines by Ben Jonson:
"This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Graver had a strife
With Nature to outdo the Life: