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You had only to lift one of your feet up quite high, as though you were going to step on the mantelpiece, and an Arab on each side would lift you to the next step. Mrs. Peterkin was sure she could not step up on their mantelpieces at home. She never had done it, she never had even tried to.
One nobleman, Lord Langford, whose ancestral home was wrecked in the rebellion of 1798, has lately been restoring it, and bought up many of the Dublin mantelpieces. The ornamentation of Belvedere House, in Gardener Row, is particularly elaborate and in wonderfully good repair. Irish family history contains few sadder stories than that of the first countess of Belvedere.
They are awfully funereal, those ornaments of the close of the last century tall gloomy horse-hair chairs, mouldy Turkey carpets with wretched druggets to guard them, little cracked sticking-plaster miniatures of people in tours and pigtails over high-shouldered mantelpieces, two dismal urns on each side of a lanky sideboard, and in the midst a queer twisted receptacle for worn-out knives with green handles.
But what particularly caught her attention was one of the two portraits that adorned the mantelpieces. The further one was attired in the rich and fanciful armour of the time of Elizabeth; the head bare, the helmet on a table on which the hand rested. It was a handsome and striking countenance; and an inscription announced it to be a Digby, an ancestor of Maltravers.
The firebacks and the andirons, and later the fire-dogs, of the open fireplaces are collectable curios of considerable interest, and the hobby may be indulged in at a moderate cost. The collection of mantelpieces may be left to the wealthy and to those who have baronial halls in which to refix them.
Her old evening dresses serve to drape the mantelpieces, and she passes every spare hour embroidering, braiding, or fringing some material to adorn her rooms. At Christmas her friends contribute specimens of their handiwork to the collection. The view of other houses and other decorations before long introduces the worm of discontent into the blossom of our friend's contentment.
A heavy stone was flung at the bank shutters: this ferocious blow made him start and the place rattle: it was the signal for a shower; and presently tink, tink, went the windows of the house, and in came the stones, starring the mirrors, upsetting the chairs, denting the papered walls, chipping the mantelpieces, shivering the bell glasses and statuettes, and strewing the room with dirty pebbles, and painted fragments, and glittering ruin.
During a comparatively brief period in the eighteenth century significantly enough, it was while the country enjoyed a short spell of national life there was something like a national patronage of the artist, and the result is visible in the noble public buildings and beautiful houses of the Irish capital, with their universally admired mantelpieces, doors, ceilings, fanlights, ironwork, and carvings.
The bedrooms are panelled with oak painted white, with splendid fireplaces and carved mantelpieces that reach the ceiling. And besides all these there are enchanting little rooms reached by unexpected staircases, by secret doors in the wall, by dark passages where one hears the rustle of ghostly brocade dresses.
"Oh, what a pity!" she exclaimed. "Real colonial, isn't it! I wish I could see the rooms inside before it is disturbed. Such doors and such dear old-fashioned mantelpieces as it must have! I just dote on the Colonial. It brings up such pictures of the old days; weddings, you know, and parties; all so different from ours and so much more interesting." Is it the chance shot that tells? Sometimes.
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