The interior of the house was as quaint and fantastic as the exterior, and was furnished and painted in a manner which was pronounced 'perfectly charming' by the ladies, and 'deuced odd' by their husbands. Anything more entirely different from an ordinary mansion arranged by the upholsterer with an unlimited order it would be difficult to conceive. The hall, the passages, and most of the rooms were hung with tapestry, and, where there was wall paper, it was in the wondrous colours and strange devices which Mr. Eardley and his friends occupied their leisure in inventing. Ordinary chairs and tables there were none, but in the course of a stroll through the rooms you would come upon old carved chests; prie-dieus; stately, high-backed, black-oak chairs, the spoil of some Elizabethan manor-house; couches covered with Utrecht velvet, and odd short seats, like the 'settles' in the porch of a country tavern, only in elaborately-carved oak. The walls, the tables, the ledges of the book-cases, were all laden, and throughout the house there seemed to be no vacant space. Objects of art lay about in extraordinary confusion and disorder; the light was reflected from steel mirrors, Venetian glasses, and old looking-glasses with china frames; from ancient armour, in which the rust was gradually eating away the gold and silver _niello_ work; from Damascus blades and Persian tulwars and Albanian yataghans. Here were Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses smirking painfully at hideous porcelain monsters from China and Japan; a buhl clock on which Louis Quatorze had been accustomed to look was flanked on either side by a coffee-coloured pug-dog in china, while over it was suspended a Japanese paper-lantern; a gauntlet, with the blood and rust of Naseby field for ever eaten into it, lay on a mosaic slab in the immediate vicinity of a carved ivory set of chessmen; and a pair of Moorish slippers had for their supporters on the one side a fan painted on chicken-skin which had once been the property of a beauty of the Regency, and on the other a plaster-of-paris caricature statuette of M. Thiers, by Danton. At the very time that Frank Eardley was making his way to the Albany, for the purpose of inducing Sir Nugent Uffington to accompany him to the china sale at Dossetor's, and to spend the rest of the day with him, as already recorded, Mr. Spiridion Pratt pulled the loud-sounding bell of the Villa--for such was the name of the artist's house in St. John's Wood--and awaited its answer by Eardley's Italian valet, who was held in high respect by his master's intimates. 'Good-morning, Gaetano,' said he, when the man appeared. 'Is Mr. Eardley at home?' 'No, signor,' replied the valet; 'he started out about half an hour ago.' 'Indeed!' said Spiridion, shaking his head with a smile. 'Is this the way he makes up for the time lost during the season? I am afraid the master is growing idle again, Gaetano?'