Litchfield enquirer., 1871-11-02
From Harper's Magazine.
 THE TALE or THE TREFETHENEss.
THE TRaFEraESEss

f v ' - -
 1.-THE TREFETaESE5s.
 Aria and I, orphan cousins, had been at schoal l0a tMelss sasafs. M claad always spent Christmas ill the city with q friend now dead, of our Uncle Matrices, and q summer month at some rural farm-house or pleasant beach. Arria was ct last eighteen, I twenty; and one day We threw up our caps and left our little slens for home home henceforth to be in the city. After people are twenty-five they nat,ir- ally may look for their tragedy, if they are to have one; but before that We anticipate only our brilliant petite comefir; unless we are very sentimental, and are going to die young, and so pass the intervening years in selecting burial sites. Thus 1t was that balls and routs and drives, ope- ra, theatre, and all gay fancies, figured largely in our scheme of the future. Why should one at eighteen foresee solitude, suffering, sin, and death?
 While write find myself returning to the light tone of my youth, and forgetting in remembrance all these years which have struck another dominant Let me for a space continue to forget it, and live my life as I lived it then, and speak as then I would have spoken.
 Maurice--he at once abjured the title his relationship enforced, for he was not old, and was still far too elegant man to care for avuncTlar honors-lived in an old house that had once been country-house, but which the encroachments of the city had finally hemmed in between walls of memorable thoroughfares and buildings It was odd to see 1t among marble and go IL II | L. bristling with corners, half-draped in woodbine, prairie-roses, and grapes; with drawn from the street; owning garden that was dormant fortune for an unborn millionaire. Indeed, by the sale of his had reaKaeas h( present wealth, after llay-. ing in youth di1sipated, with this excep- tion, the whole Of his hereditary property. He had now and always the singular qual- ity of pausing, erect and graceful still and suddenly curbing himself i'll any headlong career To look at this house was to feel sure that 1t possessed ancient treasures of plate silver salvers that repeated with musical clangor any vibration in the air, butter boats and goblets and baskets of rich, yellow, unalloyed metal; china as old as William and Mary, as precious, and as ugly; and every one knew the one priceless thing 1t possessed-a drinking cup upbuoyed by cluster of crystals like waves of the sea, and over whose golden rim and down whose sides, beaten and chased with the finest art and storied into legend, foamed the great wine-drops of carbuncles and amethysts and pointed tiny diamond sparks. My uncle owned such things; 1t was his humor to gaze on their splendors, to keep them for others to gaze at, and never to part with them. Now and then he had added other articles of virtu, too fine to be numerous. He had been also most judicious patron of art; and though collector only in a minor de- gree, you could find scattered through his multiple cabinets all the salient points of it's history, and items of perfection, from a champ-lepe enamel, whose incrusted beauty was too palpable even for the bar barrie kings of France not to have held as priceless, down to the nbboned and wa tered opacity of Black Sea pebble. The inside of the house was no less curious than the outside. The drawing-room long and lofty; the music-room ample enough for choir, and with it's great gleaming instruments seeming half the time to be peopled with the ghosts of complete and silent music. The furniture of these rooms was antique, elaborately carven in punches of blossom and leaf, draped with thick, soft cloths; the library green as swamp fed mosses are; the mnsic-room impartially purple, as beftted temple of sound; the drawing room gay and gor- geous with yellow hangings and gildings, deepened rather than dimmed by time The dining-room was more modern than the others, our uncle receiving much com pany there; the coloring was more min gled and less pronounced, the shape Of it's various articles lighter and more grace full. the woodwork and paneling white, delicately wrought, and inserted here and there with a fruit or fower-piece that made the room summery in the bleakest January. Between and around all lay an- te-rooms and closets and entries, staircas- es, blind-ways, and purposeless passages, that were eminently confusing, with whose intricacy Arria, in her love of the myste rious, at once acquainted herself, while 1 remained in opposing ignorance. I could feel with my first breath in this enchanted region that the house was far too much of a paradise for any master of it ever to de- sert it without pang, and so reioieed that it was likely to be my home.
 Maurice was so much engaged on our arrival that we were left to ourselves until he should be able to bestow more atten- tion upon us, and beg his friends to make us welcome, Meanwhile we examined our own dominions, our rlncle's peculiar apart ments, which were abodes of the most fas- tidious taste and the most bacheloresque carelessness, and finally the whole archi- tectural hurly -burly of the house. Upon this we made discoveries respecting the servants-that there was gardener nam ed Quincerl, whose wife was housekeeper; that the young coachman, Lucius, paid particular court to the pretty kitchen maid, and that Martha cast on him a be- nignant eye, but that his constant rival was to be seen in the person of Monsieur Reve, the French cook. After all this, Arria found most pleasure in rummaging the chests and old cedar wardrobes of our Dutch descended grandmothers, and she might be heard rustling above stairs, like the Castle Spectre, in thick crimson-fow- cred brocades and silver cloths, at almost any hour of the day; now and then run ming down to me as sat below, to display herself splendidly infolded in some rem nant of the glory of the Trefetheness. Once or twice she thus flashed by some one of the people, who shrunk into shad- ow and fled terrified before this brilliant creature, whom they considered to be an apparition of the past. stss
 As our mothers had been Trefetheness, we were not, but fourished under our ig- noble patronymic- for if our mothers had been sisters, our fathers also had been brothers. There was one Trefetheness, though, besides our Uncle Maurice youth whose father had been our unele's cousin, and who was. consequently, appar- entity, so far removed from us that it was not easy to feel familiar. Being poor, my uncle had benefited him, assisting him as boy in his education, and afterward be- l ing the occasion of his procuring the prac- tice of late and prominent physician. We fancied that he felt his new dignities, and accordingly stood upon ours when he came to the house, which, however, had not yet been often, although here had pre- viously been one of his homes. If he was not handsome, he was of remarkable ap- pearance; tall and erect, broad-shouldered and muscular as an athlete; thick, bright,