If it isn’t bothering you too much, I should like you to look at the ornaments—these, as much as anything else, give the room its “unlikeness” to anything you see in the city. Here is a lovely fat fish in a glass case among reeds and grasses. On the walls are antlers of the fallow deer. Then there is a framed sampler, and likewise some wonderful needlework of a bygone age when needlework was an art.
On the mantelpiece shelves are china cottages and castles, an old china mill with a wonderful mill stream, on which are china ducks, each the size of the mill-wheel! Then Red Riding Hood, in a little sprigged pinafore, carrying a dear little basket, and patting affectionately a most engaging, friendly-looking wolf, is always admired. Timothy’s grandmother (a dignified-looking matron), teaching little Timothy out of the Bible, is a relic from the days when Scriptural subjects were among the ornaments found in most households. “Going to Market” and “Returning from Market” are a choice pair of china subjects, showing the lady riding behind her husband on a prancing steed that would do credit to Rotten Row.
Mary and her little Lamb is one of the prettiest in the collection, only she lost one of her arms over fifty years ago! There are various cows and sheep (some with blue ribbons round the neck), and other quaint china oddities.
Then there is a beautiful hen sitting on a most symmetrically woven (china) straw nest packed full of eggs (each one, in proportion to the hen, is the size of an ostrich egg). The hen (eggs and all) can be lifted up, using her head, poor thing, as the handle, and then you find she is the cover to an oval dish. I always intend—should any members of our Royal Family get stranded on these hills, and drop in unexpectedly to tea—to serve them with a poached egg in this identical dish.
And you must not overlook the shining brass candlesticks, some tall and stately, some squat, with square trays and extinguishers, that have been winking and glinting in the light for a century now—and are still shining; nor the brass and horn lantern hanging from a beam. A lantern is an absolute necessity on these rugged hills when there is no moon.
How friendly the old brass things are! Just look at the warming-pan with its bright sun-face. I have no doubt modern radiators and hot-water pipes are a boon to those who do not mind headaches and dried-up air—but do they look as warm and comforting as the gleaming warming-pan?
That reminds me of the first time Abigail came down from London. She looked at the warming-pan with interest, as she had never seen one before. The weather was cold, and hot-water bottles were the order of the night in town.
When I returned from an evening stroll with some guests, she met me with an anxious face. “If you please, miss, will you kindly show me how you keep the water inside that warming-pan? I can’t get it to stay inside nohow when I start to lift it!”
I wonder if you have ever seen a dresser like this one? The oak shelves forming the upper part are built into a deep recess in the wall, one above the other, up to the rafters, and all set back in the thickness of the wall—and you can see how thick these walls are from the window-ledge, which is fifteen inches deep. But they need to be solid, for the winter storms that thrash across these hills show scant consideration for present-day building methods; and a modern “bijou bungalow” would probably be found scattered about the next parish, if it ever lived long enough to get its roof on!
The dresser is closely hung with jugs and mugs and cups, willow-pattern plates and dishes make a good deal of white and blue against the walls, which are a full buttercup yellow, while a collection of ancient china teapots, with some square willow-pattern vegetable dishes and a tall Stilton cheese dish with two big sunflowers on it, occupy the wider ledge at the bottom.
Here are some uncommon specimens of lustre jugs. This is a rare lustre mug, brown with green bars outside, and a purple band inside. A lustre pepper-box stands on one of the dresser ledges, and salt-cellars of glass, so heavy as to suggest paper-weights.
Do you know the fascination of old English mugs? On this dresser they range from a tiny mug in Rockingham ware, only an inch and a half high, to noble things that suggest long draughts of home-made herb beer! There are mugs with bunches of flowers on them, others with conventional bands or designs, some with landscapes, some with butterflies, some with words of wisdom to be imbibed by the youthful along with the milk.
Jugs, again, are most alluring, once you get a mania for them! One of my jugs is of brown earthenware, smothered with a raised design showing a trailing grape-vine, with big bunches of grapes here and there. Two other jugs that belonged to a bygone ancestress are apparently made of a white stone wall, with the most natural-looking ivy creeping up it and displaying bunches of berries. Jug-makers of the past gave so much interest to their goods by reason of this raised work, instead of being content to transfer a flat design as they do now. One white jug has off-standing deer around it, grazing among trees. Another has a hunt in full progress, horses and riders, dogs and all—though it always hurts me to see the running hare.
A real, proper dresser is a useful bit of furniture, provided it has plenty of hooks. It holds such a quantity of things. I have all sorts of odd cups and saucers on mine, relics of past treasures that have somehow survived the hand of the hired washer-up; little bits that remind me of all sorts of pleasant things, such as tea-services my mother had when I was little, some that have belonged to other relatives.
In passing, I may say that a dresser of this sort is a great incentive to good works. Many a relation, on looking at it, has said, “I have an old jug that belonged to your great, no, your great-great-aunt; I shall give it to you, as you like things of that sort.”
Or another time it will be: “What a collection of odd cups! Good gracious, if a little thing like that amuses you, I’ll turn out a lot I have stored away somewhere, glad to get rid of them; it only annoys me to look at them, as it reminds me how all the rest of the set got smashed. You can have them and welcome.”
There has been a good deal of this sort of “give and take” about the furnishing of this cottage. And it is so much more interesting to me as the owner to know the history of the various items, than if I had merely bought antiques by the houseful, as I have known some people do. In the latter case, a room is so apt to look like nothing but an old curiosity shop; as it is, the things all seem to “belong,” just as much as we do.
But I mustn’t weary you with a catalogue of household furnishings, though I know, if you could actually see the china and the little bedrooms, with white, washable handwork everywhere, and wonderful old patchwork and knitted quilts, you would love it all. The Bird room is the general favourite, with its unique crochet; there are swallows flying across the curtain-tops, swans sailing among bulrushes on the washstand splash, wild geese flying above the tree-tops at another window, ducks swimming sedately along towel-ends, more swallows (in cross-stitch this time) on a table-cover, parrots (in darned filet) on the dressing-table cloth, while seagulls float along a frieze, a glass case of rare birds is over the mantelpiece, and a large wool-work pheasant, balancing itself ingeniously on the top of a small basket of grapes, and endeavouring to look as though it were quite its natural habitat, is framed, and hangs on the wall. I don’t think the far-back relative who worked it had much of an eye for proportion, however!
On the mantelpiece stands a sedate row of china fowls, a marble fountain basin in the centre, with white pigeons basking around the edge.
Just one other room you must look into—the sitting-room, because I want you to see my dolls’ things. Yes, I know it sounds imbecile, but I never had a dolls’ house. When I was young, the rest of us were brothers, and it wasn’t considered economical, therefore, to present a toy that would only be serviceable to one out of the bunch. Besides which, in those days children didn’t immediately get what they stamped for. So I had to go without the thing I yearned for above all others. But you may be sure I took care of what dolls’ things did chance to come my way.
Dolls themselves were very scarce, but I had several sets of dolls’ tea-things, given by discerning aunts, and here they are, in a funny old glass cupboard in the corner of the sitting-room. One is a very small set, with teeny pink rosebuds on it; another is a larger set, that my small friends drank