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Updated: June 23, 2025
As the attic was used for storing trunks and lumber, only two square yards of floor could be spared for Gwenda. But the two square yards, cleared, and covered with a strip of old carpet, and furnished with a little table and one chair; the wall-space by the window with its hanging bookcase; the window itself and the corner fireplace near it were hers beyond division and dispute.
Here, every bit of wall-space, half way to the ceiling upon three sides, was given over to books; while the fourth, that opposite the door, contained a most artistic fireplace, above which, in lieu of the sometime mirror, the chimney had been divided to insert a window, one perfect sheet of plate glass, almost as clear as the ether itself through which was a delightful vista of green mingled with the vivid glow of blossoms.
We may begin with our ambition set on museum treasures, but we can come happily down to the friendly fragments that fit our private purses and the wall-space by the inglenook. Tapestries are not to be bought lightly, as one buys a summer coat, to throw aside at the change of taste or circumstance.
Likewise, he bought a string of horse-hair bridles from a convict in a Western penitentiary, who spread the good news until it seemed to Daylight that half the convicts in that institution were making bridles for him. He bought them all, paying from twenty to fifty dollars each for them. They were beautiful and honest things, and he decorated all the available wall-space of his bedroom with them.
My bedroom at home was not large, yet it could have contained a dozen similar forecastles, and taking into consideration the height of the ceiling, a score at least. It smelled sour and musty, and by the dim light of the swinging sea-lamp I saw every bit of available wall-space hung deep with sea-boots, oilskins, and garments, clean and dirty, of various sorts.
Portions of the floor, and half the wall-space, were taken up by book-shelves ordinary and extraordinary; the remaining parts, together with brackets, side-tables, &c., being occupied by casts, statuettes, medallions, and plaques of various descriptions, picked up by the owner in his wanderings through France and Italy.
Beside such varied ministrations, the woman of the Middle Ages rode to the chase, went out hawking, snared birds with nets, ferreted rabbits, spun, wove, and embroidered. Embroidering was a really formidable occupation, for the great hall, and each room, had its special hangings, and on fête-days every inch of wall-space was covered.
Approached by narrow passages between the grey houses and shops, the church is most imposing, for it is not only a large building, but the cramped position magnifies its bulk and emphasizes the height of the Norman tower, surmounted by the tall stone spire added during the fourteenth century. Going up a wide flight of steps, necessitated by the slope of the ground, we enter the church through the beautiful porch, and are at once confronted with the astonishingly perfect paintings which cover the walls of the nave. The pictures occupy nearly all the available wall-space between the arches and the top of the clerestory, and their crude quaintnesses bring the ideas of the first half of the fifteenth century vividly before us. There is a spirited representation of St. George in conflict with a terrible dragon, and close by we see a bearded St. Christopher holding a palm-tree with both hands, and bearing on his shoulder the infant Christ. Then comes Herod's feast, with the King labelled Herodi. The guests are shown with their arms on the table in the most curious positions, and all the royal folk are wearing ermine. The coronation of the Virgin, the martyrdom of St. Thomas
The wax cells, with their maximum capacity as against a minimum wall-space, are the equivalent, with the superaddition of a marvellous scientific skill, of the Osmia's compartments in which the stonework is reduced to a minimum through the selection of a reed. The artificer in mud and the artificer in wax obey the same tendency: they economize. Do they know what they are doing?
The whole canyon is a mine of fossils, in which five thousand feet of horizontal strata are exposed in regular succession over more than a thousand square miles of wall-space, and on the adjacent plateau region there is another series of beds twice as thick, forming a grand geological library a collection of stone books covering thousands of miles of shelving, tier on tier, conveniently arranged for the student.
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