nd,
going up stairs to the old drawing-room, dusted the relics enshrined
there with a new reverence for them, glorifying herself in their
undoubted antiquity. Fires, indeed! Certainly not.

The breakfast-table was spread with snowy damask, worn thin almost to
gossamer, and fairly embroidered with delicate darning; the cups and
plates belonged to the crocodile set, and the meager repast was at least
daintily served. Cousin Copeland had his egg, and Gardis satisfied her
young appetite with fish caught in the river behind the house by Pompey,
and a fair amount of Dinah's corn-bread. The two old slaves had refused
to leave Gardiston House. They had been trained all their lives by Miss
Margaretta; and now that she was gone, they took pride in keeping the
expenses of the table, as she had kept them, reduced to as small a sum
as possible, knowing better than poor Gardis herself the pitiful
smallness of the family income, derived solely from the rent of an old
warehouse in the city. For the war had not impoverished Gardiston House;
it was impoverished long before. Acre by acre the land had gone, until
nothing was left save a small corn-field and the flower-garden; piece by
piece the silver had vanished, until nothing was left save three
teaspoons, three tablespoons, and four forks. The old warehouse had
brought in little rent during those four long years, and they had fared
hardly at Gardiston. Still, in their isolated situation away from the
main roads, their well-known poverty a safeguard, they had not so much
as heard a drum or seen a uniform, blue or gray, and this was a rare and
fortunate exemption in those troublous times; and when the war was at
last ended, Miss Margaretta found herself no poorer than she was before,
with this great advantage added, that now everybody was poor, and,
indeed, it was despicable to be anything else. She bloomed out into a
new cheerfulness under this congenial state of things, and even invited
one or two contemporaries still remaining on the old plantations in the
neighborhood to spend several days at Gardiston. Two ancient dames
accepted the invitation, and the state the three kept together in the
old drawing-room under the family portraits, the sweep of their
narrow-skirted, old-fashioned silk gowns on the inlaid staircase when
they went down to dinner, the supreme unconsciousness of the break-neck
condition of the marble flooring and the mold-streaked walls, the airy
way in which they dran