The parlor projects twenty feet beyond the body of the house, covered by a portico one story, and surmounted by the billiard-room. The original plan of the projection was square; but when the cellar was built up to the floor above, the room was projected beyond the square by three sides of an octagon, leaving a place beyond the cellar-wall not excavated, and it was in this space that the faithful Cæsar and Martin concealed their master's plate when the British visited Monticello.[57] The floor of this room is in squares, the squares being ten inches, of the wild cherry, very hard, susceptible of a high polish, and the color of mahogany. The border of each square, four inches wide, is of beech, light-colored, hard, and bearing a high polish. Its original cost was two hundred dollars. After nearly seventy years of use and abuse, a half-hour's dusting and brushing will make it compare favorably with the handsomest tessellated floor. [57] See page 56. From the same pen are the following graphic descriptions of the views seen from Monticello: Monticello is five hundred and eighty feet high. It slopes eastward one-and-a-half miles by a gentle declivity to the Rivanna River. Half a mile beyond is Shadwell, the birthplace of Jefferson, a beautiful spot overlooking the river. The northeastern side of the mountain and slope is precipitous, having dashed aside the countless floods of the Rivanna through all the tide of time. On the southwest, it is separated from the next mountain of the range, rising three hundred feet above it, by a road-pass two hundred and twenty feet below. This obstructs the view to the southwest. From the southwest to the northeast is a horizon unbroken, save by one solitary, pyramid-shaped mountain, its peak under the true meridian, and distant by air-line forty-seven miles. Northeast the range pointing to the west terminates two miles off, its lateral spurs descending by gentle slopes to the Rivanna at your feet, covered with farms and green wheat-fields. This view of farms extends northeast and east six or seven miles. You trace the Rivanna by its cultivated valley as it passes east, apparently through an unbroken forest; an inclined plane descends from your feet to the ocean two hundred miles distant. All the western and northwestern slopes being poor, and the eastern and southeastern fertile, as the former are presented to the spectator, and are for the most part in wood, it presents the appearance of unbroken forest, bounded by an ocean-like horizon.