Note (return) — AN OLD HOUSE AND ITS STORY.

In the cellarage, where we disturb many busy spiders and stealthy centipedes, is a large, solidly-floored apartment, where possibly the house-servants were used to congregate in the old slave days. There is no chimney-place in this room, nor, indeed, is there any convenience whatever for cooking purposes in the main building, which omission inclines me to the opinion that one of the detached wings was used for the kitchen offices, there being large fireplaces in both of them, very suitable for the getting up of good dinners.3 The grounds about the house have been much altered of late years—the gardens long since destroyed. A smug, close-shaven turf replaces the old-fashioned flower-beds and shrubbery, amid which I love to fancy sweet Peggy Arnold trailing her French brocades and flowered chintzes, her rosy ear attuned to the high-flown compliments of the men of fashion whom her beauty and her husband's lavish hospitality drew about her—her husband the traitor who a few months afterward was flying, a detected felon, from justice, leaving his fair young wife, with her babe in her arms, to face the awful wrath of Washington.