The portraits of many of them, at least one to every generation, hung on the walls, and it was curious to notice, what never any one of them could see, except the granddaughter, the progress and the decline from generation to generation. The earliest of all had sailed and buccaneered with Henry Morgan, a great lover and destroyer of life. It was from him that the expression and air of them all had descended. Love and battle had carved his face. Out from behind his bold but easy face peered a prophetic pitifulness, just as behind the loaded brown clouds of drifting storm peers the innocence of blue, and upon it white clouds that are thin and waved like an infant’s hair. Upon this model his descendants’ faces had been carved, not by love and battle, but by his might alone. Even the tender women flaunted it. It nestled, an eagle, among the old man’s snows; it possessed the little child, and he had nothing but the face of the buccaneer, like an eaglet in a cage. A house is a perdurable garment, giving and taking of life. If it only fit, straightway it begins to chronicle our days. It beholds our sorrows and our joys; its untale-bearing walls know all our thoughts, and if it be such a house as grows after the builders are gone, our thoughts presently owe much to it; we have but to glance at a certain shadow or a curve in the wall-paper pattern to recall them, softened as by an echo, and that corner or that gable starts many a fancy that reaches beyond the stars, many a fancy gay or enriched with regrets. It is aware of birth, marriage and death; and who dares say that there is not kneaded into the stones a record more pleasing than brass? With what meanings the vesperal beam slips through a staircase window in autumn! The moon has an expression proper to us alone, nested among our limes, or heaving an ivory shoulder above the neighbour roofs. As we enter a room in our house we are conscious of a fitness in its configuration that defies mathematics. Rightly used, such a space will inspire a stately ordering of our lives; it is, in another respect, the amplest canvas for the art of life. It becomes so much a part of us that we exclaim-- “This beautiful house in sand and stone: What will it be in heaven?”