[Gutenberg 35055] • A Pasteboard Crown: A Story of the New York Stage

Excerpt from A Pasteboard Crown: A Story of the New York Stage

But really, no one knowing anything about the old place could help having a feeling of amazement at hearing of a tenant being found for it. It was that saddest, most uncanny thing - a deserted house. A great, big, Colonial-like frame structure, it stood high on the hill side, Showing white and ghostly between the too closely set evergreens and conifers before it. That money had been lavished upon the place in the distant past was evident even in these very trees, which were the choicest of their kind. He who had planted them must have been a melancholy man. Drooping, mournful trees seemed particularly to appeal to him, for the very rare weeping hemlock, like a black fountain, was there as well as the weeping larch, with its small cones and a veritable army of white pines, Norway Spruces, balsam firs, and the red cedar that in its blackish stateliness is SO like the Irish yew. A solemn company at the best of times, when properly spaced and trimmed, but now with unpruned branches intertwining, the trees that were killing one another in their struggle for light were positively lugubrious. And behind that screen of matted, many - Shaded evergreen the pallid, bony old house stood trembling under high winds, while its upper windows stared blankly down upon that Broadway that, escaping from the hurrying city with its millions of restless feet, here passed calmly on, by woodland and green meadows, toward distant Albany.