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It was a handsome house, after the standard of nearly half a century ago. It had an opulent air, with its swelling breasts of bay windows, through which showed fine lace curtains; its dormer-windows, each with its carefully draped curtains; its black-walnut front door, whose side-lights were screened with medallioned lace.
"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown away I want to make 'em hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight," he would passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby black-walnut writing-table and shaking his thin consumptive fist in the fact of all the accumulated ugliness in the world.
Not in the painter, O, no, skill is commendable even when unworthily employed, but in him who orders it. You may buy a pine door, which is very well; pine doors are good; you tell every man that comes into your house it's black-walnut or oak or mahogany. If that isn't greeting him with lying lips and a deceitful heart, the moral law isn't as clear as it ought to be.
But necessity forced him to resign himself to it, and he stifled his scruples as best he might. The furniture of the room Was composed of a writing table, a dresser, and an old black-walnut chest divided into two compartments, such as we find in the houses of well-to-do peasants. After a fruitless search of the table and dresser, Louis turned to the old chest.
Half of their little dining-room is filled with a black-walnut sideboard, ingeniously contrived to take up as much space as possible and hold nothing, its graceless top adorned with a stag's head carved in wood and imitation antlers.
Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl's room over that; wide front hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor. It was considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was. But now, I don't say but what it's old-fashioned.
There were some steel engravings, dim under their old glasses, on the wall, Evangeline, and Lincoln's Cabinet, and Daniel Webster in a rumpled shirt and a long swallowtail; all of which Eleanor's looking-glass and the mirrored doors of a black-walnut wardrobe, reflected in multiplying dullness. Maurice's charming good nature in that first boarding winter never failed.
The furniture was black-walnut, upholstered in crimson plush; the tables had marble tops; the hangings were lace under heavily fringed crimson lambrequins dependent from massive gilt mouldings. There were a bronze clock and a whatnot and a few gilt-framed oil-paintings of the conventional landscape type, contemporary with the furniture in American best parlors.
It has a hideous black-walnut sideboard, an "oil-painting" of pale, bloated fruit on one side, and pale, bloated fish on the other, and a strip of black-and-white marbled oil-cloth below. I feel sometimes as if I could hardly live until my father-in-law rises from his chair and kisses his wife good-bye before going off to the factory.
Murphy came down presently from the dizzy top of a huge black-walnut tree, reporting that he had been able to see into the river angle of their works; had for a while distinguished nothing, but presently discovered Indians, crouched motionless, the brilliancy of their paint, which at first he had mistaken for patches of autumn leaves, betraying them when they moved.
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