Time soon enough changed the ways and the likings of the rich. The old homes came to be rented out or closed for two and three years at a time. Some were put on the market, but no one ever bought them. Well-built mansions they were, with twenty and thirty rooms and grounds extending back for half an acre, stables with rooms for the coachman’s family, private boat landings, romantic rustic arbors where tea used to be served, and summer houses with lacey latticework where débutantes gathered to read Tennyson and their own love letters. Birge’s Corners built up so rapidly that the decline of Birge’s Lake was scarcely noticed. One by one the families stopped coming to the lake for the summer. There were newer, more luxurious or more isolated places—their younger generation complained of the lack of thrilling events. The “ghost village” it was truthfully called, house after house lying idle, save for stray sparrows or squirrels who burrowed snugly in the eaves. “Ali Baba”—Joshua Maples in writing—was made general caretaker. One by one the families left him in charge of the ghost mansions. He knew just which room it was where the Confederate captain married the Boston belle, and how many roses had been used in the decorations. He could tell the exact spot in the Luddington house where young Luddington had shot himself—the night before his theft of bank funds should be made public. A stranger could not point at any of the deserted mansions but what Ali Baba, taking off his tattered hat and scratching his white, curly head philosophically, would summon a word picture of the past, when the curly head had been black and the wrinkled face smooth and boyish. “They say society has all gone to live at Newport in the summer,” Ali Baba would summarize. “Well, mebbe they has. All I know is this—that right here at Birge’s Lake from 1860 to 1890—for nigh thirty years, there wasn’t no place in the land that could boast of entertaining any finer. We’ve had three presidents come fishing—right there by that landing—and Patti sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in that big house over there—the one with the gables. I passed the punch afterwards—yes, sir, right up to time I was, in a new dress suit Major McAndrews bought me. I never heard nobody sing as she did—and the wimmen said her pink satin train was six feet long. Well, I’ll take that back—I have heard it sung as good and mebbe better by a girl right in this village—a nightingale girl named Thurley Precore.