Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown SketchbookWarner, Frances Lester
History
Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown Sketchbook
Warner, Frances Lester
Massachusetts -- Description and travel
"Well," said Alexander, "the legend is very old. And the second-story
rooms are a great deal higher-studded than the rooms downstairs. There's
one door upstairs that looks as if it had been made for a giant. But
they say that some of the English builders used to plan a house that
way."
Whether the house is upside down or not, one thing is certain--that here
Miss Lydia Jackson was married to Emerson. Once in a while an event in
the world takes place in precisely the perfect setting. Emerson's
marriage was one. The huge English door, almost as broad as it is tall,
with its great brass knocker and deep paneling, knows how to swing wide
open in a stately way of its own; a proper door to welcome Mr. Emerson.
And the rooms inside, with their high white paneling and delicate
beading around the top, have dignity in every line. In every room there
is a fireplace, with tiles. In the room where Emerson was married, the
tiles around the fireplace illustrate Scripture stories--the drawings
exactly in the style of the pictures in the New England Primer. Jonah
emerges from his specially constructed fish; Elijah sits under his
juniper bush; Jacob awakens from his dream. Under each picture is a
reference to the Bible, with chapter and verse; so that, if you should
fail to recognize any Bible worthy from his picture, you could look him
up.
In the hallway, the white staircase, with its mahogany rail, is deeply
paneled at the sides, and if you stand beneath the stairway where it
turns, you see still more careful paneling on the under side of each
stair. The spindles of the balustrade are white and delicately carved,
and the slender newel-post is twined with a perfectly proportioned white
spiral, like a smooth round stem of a vine, running round and round it,
and disappearing into the woodwork of the rail.
This house, with its linden trees, its traditions, its Lion and Unicorn
rampant over the sea, was the best example of old-time royalist elegance
that we saw.
* * * * *
"Are you going sketching this afternoon?" asked Barbara politely of the
artist.
"Yes, on Burial Hill," said he. "Want to come?"
"Don't you ever carry a camp-chair?" said I. For days I had been longing
to ask him that question, when I saw him starting out with no visible
sketching equipment except a leather affair, which looked like a
lawyer's brief-case, strapped over his shoulder.
"Yes, I always take a chair," said he. "It folds. It's in the leather
case."
I, who remember the days when people went sketching with an immense
French sketching-umbrella, a camp-chair, an easel, and a portfolio,
looked with respect upon the leather case.
"Before we go up to the hill," said the artist, "don't you want me to
show you the most stunning subject for a painting that I've found?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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