The matter was settled by the appearance of a buyer for "Sunnyside," at a price that paid me a fair profit, and I made the sale subject to possession being given when the new house was completed.
[Illustration: "REDSTONE">[
Within a stone's throw of "Sunnyside" was a plot of land, a little less than two acres in extent that we had always admired. I bought the land for five thousand dollars and the architect commenced at once on the plans.
We thought that the new house was to be our home for the rest of our days and naturally the greatest interest was taken in every detail. The first plans submitted were satisfactory, after a few minor changes, and ground was broken on July 2d, 1881. How we watched the progress.
From the time the first shovelful of earth was taken out for the excavations until the last work was finished, not a day passed that we did not go over it all.
"Redstone," taking its name from the red sandstone of which it was built, was, and is to-day, a fine example of the architecture then so much in vogue for country houses.
The Matthews House on Riverside Drive, New York City, so much admired, was designed by the same architect and modelled after it.
Standing on a hill its three massive outside chimneys support a roof of graceful outlines and generous proportions. From the three second-story balconies one gets views near and distant of a beautiful country. The fourteen-feet wide piazza on the first floor, extending across the front and around the tower, with its stone porte cochere and entrance arch is most inviting. With grounds tastefully laid out, driveways with their white-stone paved gutters, cut-stone steps to the terraces, great trees, and handsome shrubs the place was a delight to the eye, and at the time, of which I write there was nothing to compare with it in that section.
Through a massive doorway one enters a hall of baronial character, thirty-three feet long, eighteen feet wide, and twenty-one feet high, finished in oak with open beam ceiling and above the high wainscot a rough wall in Pompeian red.
Two features of the hall are the great stone fireplace with its old-fashioned crane and huge wrought iron andirons and the stained glass window on the staircase, a life-sized figure of a "Knight of Old."