It was true; Tuckerman couldn’t look like a daredevil with those enormous glasses. But to offset the studious look they gave him his face was now a beautiful lobster-like red and beginning to peel.
Any one could see, moreover, that Cotterell Hall was the apple of his eye. It amused Tom and David to see the affection and pride with which he regarded every stick and stone of the old house. Ben was more sympathetic, for Ben was by nature interested in old things, and had in turn collected everything from abandoned bird’s nests to rusty jackknives.
It was Ben who, searching through a cupboard at one side of the fireplace in the front room at the Hall, pulled out a package of old letters and gave a shout of joy. “Hi there, see what I’ve found!” he cried as he untied the bundle and threw the envelopes loosely on the table.
“What is it? Old letters,” said Tom, glancing at the yellowing paper.
“Postage stamps!” triumphed Ben. “Some of the earliest issues! I’ll bet you never saw that St. Louis stamp with the two bears on it before.”
“Humph,” said David. “Postage stamps! No one collects them now.”
But John Tuckerman looked over Ben’s shoulder, and then snatched up one of the letters. “You’re right, Benjamin. These are rare ones. I shouldn’t wonder if they were worth a great deal of money.”
It was not, however, the money value of the things in the house that interested Tuckerman. It was partly his love of old things, especially of things that were beautifully made, and partly his feeling that they had belonged to the Cotterells for so long, the Cotterells being his own people. “Uncle Christopher owned all these things,” he said. “Poor Uncle Christopher. He was stiff-necked, no doubt; but he had to suffer for it. I’ve found a book he wrote in, and I can see that he was too proud to sell his heirlooms, and that he had very little money, and didn’t want anyone to know how hard up he was. So he turned hermit. He didn’t really hate other people; he was simply so made up that he couldn’t mix with them on an equal footing.”
David pretended to regard the Cotterell family secret as a great joke, although he admitted that he was very much puzzled over what he called “the mystery of the lady with enormous feet.” On the same afternoon when Ben found the rare postage stamps, David, being alone with Tom in the front room, cocked an eye at the painted gentleman on the wall, and thus addressed him:
“Sir Peter, I don’t want to be disrespectful; but it does seem to me you were mighty tight with your silver when your good neighbors were doing their best to get the thirteen United States started. Or didn’t you really have the things they suspected you of having? You’ve got a long nose and a twinkle in your eye, and I’d say it mightn’t be beyond you to have your little game at the expense of Barmouth.”