An Old English Home and Its Dependencies. Baring-Gould Sabine

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СКАЧАТЬ preparation of lessons, during prayers, my eyes reverted to the piece of bread and butter. It remained unnoticed. That it was also unobserved by the servants, who were supposed to clean the room, is not perhaps matter of surprise.

      The next day passed – still the bread and butter hung suspended – but on the third day, during prayers, flop! – down it came in front of the master, and left behind it a nasty, greasy stain on the ceiling.

      "Whose piece of bread and butter is that?" asked the master, when Amen had been said.

      I had to confess, and was whipped.

      That stain in the ceiling grew darker daily. The dust of the room adhered to the butter. It was not effaced all the while I remained a boarder, and I involuntarily every day, and frequently daily, looked at it, to see how much deeper the tinge was that the patch acquired.

      Years after, when I was a man, and the old master was dead, and the house was in other hands, I ventured to ask the then tenants to be allowed to look at my old school-haunt. And – actually – the bread and butter stain was still there. Like murder – it could not be hid. The ceiling had been repeatedly whitewashed, but ever through the coverings that overlaid it, the butter mark reasserted itself.

      I cannot say whether it was this which causes me always, on entering a room, to direct my eyes to the ceiling – but I do, and observe it always with much interest.

      The ceiling of the world is not one blank space; it is sprinkled with stars at night, and strewn with clouds by day. Why then should the ceilings of our rooms be blank surfaces? We spread carpets of colour on our floors. We decorate richly our walls. Why should the ceiling alone be left in hideous baldness, in fact, absolutely plain? White ceilings were a product of that worst period of art – save the mark! that age of no art at all, the beginning of the present century.

      The ceiling came in in the reign of Henry VIII., and reached its greatest perfection in that of Elizabeth. At a later period the ornamentation became richer, but not so tasteful.

      The mouldings were worked with "putty lime," lime finely sifted and mixed with some hair, the lines of the ornamentation were made with ribbons of copper or lead, and the pattern was fashioned by hand over this.

      It is supposed that the drops one finds in Tudor ceilings, and which are not of plaster, or plaster only, but of carved wood, are a mere ornament, and purposeless.

      This, however, is not the case. Such enriched ceilings are very heavy, and their weight has a tendency to break down the laths to which they adhere, but these pendents are bolted into the rafters, and serve to form so many supports for the entire ceiling, which without them might in time fall.

      The Elizabethan ceiling was geometrical in design, but with bands of flower-work, conventional in character, introduced, and sometimes consisted in strap-work, studded with rosettes, wondrously interlacing.

      Then came a simpler geometrical pattern, circles enclosing wreaths of flowers copied from nature, exquisitely delicate and beautiful; but the imitation was carried sometimes too far, as when the flower heads are suspended on fine stalks of copper wire.

      In a little squirarchical mansion in Cornwall, of no architectural beauty, there was a marvellously beautiful ceiling of the date of Charles II., the flowers and fruit infinitely varied, and wrought with exquisite delicacy. The room was low, and for that reason the artist had taken special pains in the modelling.

      A "Brummagem" man bought up the land and the house – this latter was far too small to suit his ideas, and it was left unoccupied.

      One day the rector said to him: "I want to have my school treat next Thursday – should rain fall, may I take the children into the old hall?"

      "By all means," said the new squire; "but it will be stuffy: I will have it ventilated."

      He at once went down with two carpenters and ripped strips through the lovely ceiling from one end of the room to the other, utterly destroying this incomparable work, that must have occupied the artist months of patient labour, and which had called forth the best efforts of his genius.

      That is how mulish stupidity is every day destroying the achievements of genius. It is on a level with that of the chawbacon who, having got hold of a Stradella violin, broke it up to light his fire with the splinters.

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      1

      In the illustration the place occupied by the old woman is beneath the heap on the right hand side.

      2

      Wren Hoskins, in Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries, London, 1870, p. 100.

      3

      Dumont, "La dépopulation," in Revue de l'École d'Anthrop

1

In the illustration the place occupied by the old woman is beneath the heap on the right hand side.

2

Wren Hoskins, in Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries, London, 1870, p. 100.

3

Dumont, "La dépopulation," in Revue de l'École d'Anthropologie, Jan., 1897.

4

Dasent, History of Brunt Nial, 1861, vol. i. p. xiv.

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