The furniture was in keeping with the house, for it was all ancient and shabby, and had a wonderful individuality about it, which, in Clement Dulcimer’s opinion, quite atoned for its shabbiness. Almost all those old chairs and tables, and sofas, and brass-mounted sideboards, and Indian cabinets, and Queen Anne whatnots, had come to the Vicar by inheritance, and it was to him as if he saw the friendly faces of dead and gone kindred smiling at him from the three-cornered bureau, or the Japanese escritoire, or the walnut-wood chest of drawers. He even got into the way of calling the furniture after the testators who had left it to him, and would tell his wife to fetch him the packet of sermon-paper out of Aunt Tabitha, or that he had left his spectacles on Uncle Joseph. The dining-room on this autumnal Sunday evening had a look of homely comfort which was cheering to a heart not given wholly over to spiritual things. It was a long low room, with three square casements on the southern side, and a wide old fireplace, bordered with blue and white Dutch tiles, at the end. On each side of the fireplace was the deep recess before mentioned, filled with old oak shelves, on which were ranged the odds and ends of porcelain and delf which had, as it were, dropped from various branches of the family tree into Clement Dulcimer’s lap. Aunt Tabitha’s Swansea tea set, with its sprawling red roses on a cream-coloured ground; uncle Timothy’s quaint Lowestoft jugs; cousin Simeon’s Bow punchbowl; grandmamma’s Oriental dessert-plates; a Chelsea shepherdess _minus_ an arm, a Chelsea shepherd piping to a headless sheep. There was a good deal of rubbish, no doubt, as Mrs. Piper declared, amidst that heterogeneous collection; but there was a great deal more value in those cups and plates than Clement Dulcimer suspected, or he would have been sorely tempted to exchange them for books. At the end of the room facing the fireplace stood that fine old sideboard of the Chippendale period, familiarly known as Uncle Joseph. Facing the windows there was a curtained archway communicating with the library. To-night a big fire burned in the capacious grate, a log of the old poplar that was blown down in the last high wind blazing merrily at the top of the coals, as if the stout old tree felt glad to make so jovial an end. The supper table shone and glittered with old silver and heavy diamond-cut glass, with here and there a tall-stemmed beaker, or an engraved flask, as old as the pictures of Teniers or Breughel. A bowl of chrysanthemums, a ham, a game pie, a sirloin, and a salad made a glow of colour, and promised a substantial repast. Everybody knew that what the Vicar gave was of the best, no cheap champagnes or doubtful moselles, but sound claret, and the finest beer that was brewed on this side of York.