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Updated: June 8, 2025
Its structure remained the same, but the brothers made no effort to support its ancient grandeur. Nothing more simple can be imagined than the appointments of their monastery. The carved-oak staircase was there, but the stairs wore carpetless, and the panelled and parqueted hall was bare of ornament, except for a picture, in a pale oaken frame, of the head of Christ in its crown of thorns.
At four o'clock we attended even-song at the cathedral. I shall not say what I felt when the white-surpliced boy choir entered, winding down those vaulted aisles, or when I heard for the first time that intoned service, with all its "witchcraft of harmonic sound." I sat quite by myself in a high carved-oak seat, and the hour was passed in a trance of serene delight.
I fear you must have thought me very impertinent just now when I talked so coolly of taking shelter here. 'I am only too glad that you should find refuge in the old place. He wheeled a couple of ponderous carved-oak chairs close to the hearth, and begged us to sit there; but Milly preferred standing in the noble old gothic window looking out at the rain.
Thence to the library, lined with its carved-oak dwarf bookcases, containing books which nobody had opened for a generation Livy, Gibbon, Hume, Burke, Smollett, Plutarch, Thomson. These sages, clad in shiny brown leather and gilding, made as good a lining for the walls as anything else, and gave an air of snugness to the room in which the family dined when there was no company.
Dunbar's apartments, and walked without ceremony into the tapestried chamber, where he found the banker sitting near a table, upon which a silver coffee service, a Dresden cup and saucer, and two or three covered dishes gave evidence that Mr. Dunbar had been breakfasting. Cold meats, raised pies, and other comestibles were laid out upon the carved-oak sideboard.
But he must needs think he could improve upon it reinforce it. His remark about the cup of tea had half-reference to its appearance on the horizon; or, rather on the little carved-oak table near the window, whose flaps were being accommodated for its reception as he spoke.
It was a small dark-looking room, lined with dingily-bound books upon heavy carved-oak shelves, and with no other furniture than a massive writing-table and three or four arm-chairs. Over the mantelpiece, which was modern and low, there was a portrait of a young man with a dark handsome face, and it was at this that Augusta Darrell was looking.
Fred Forrester had eyes for none of these objects, as he looked here and there, now in the low-ceilinged and carved-oak dining-room, then in the drawing-room, and, lastly, in Sir Godfrey Markham's library a gloomy, tree-shaded room, where he thought it possible that his friend and companion might be hiding.
There were Flemish carved-oak cabinets, and big Japan vases; a mantelpiece draped with dusty crimson velvet, a broken Venetian glass above it, and a group of rusty-looking arms on each side; long limp amber curtains to the three tall windows, with festooned valances in an advanced state of disarrangement and dilapidation.
Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked. To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.
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