Our good Colonel’s house had received a coat of paint, which, like Madame Latour’s rouge¹ in her latter days, only served to make her careworn² face look more ghastly. The kitchens were gloomy. The stables were gloomy. Great black passages; cracked conservatory³; dilapidated bathroom, with melancholy⁴ waters moaning and fizzing from the cistern⁵; the great large blank stone staircase — were all so many melancholy features in the general countenance⁶ of the house; but the Colonel thought it perfectly⁷, cheerful and pleasant, and furnished it in his rough-and-ready way. One day a cartload of chairs; the next a waggonful of fenders, fire-irons, and glass and crockery — a quantity of supplies, in a word, he poured into the place. There were a yellow curtain in the back drawing-room, and green curtains in the front. The carpet was an immense bargain, bought dirt cheap, sir, at a sale in Euston Square. He was against the purchase of a carpet for the stairs. What was the good of it? What did men want with stair-carpets? His own apartment contained a wonderful assortment⁸ of lumber⁹. Shelves which he nailed himself, old Indian garments, camphor trunks. What did he want with gewgaws? anything was good enough for an old soldier. But the spare bedroom was endowed with all sorts of splendour: a bed as big as a general’s tent, a cheval glass — whereas the Colonel shaved in a little cracked mirror, which cost him no more than King Stephen’s breeches — and a handsome new carpet; while the boards of the Colonel’s bedchamber were as bare — as bare as old Miss Scragg’s shoulders, which would be so much more comfortable were they covered up. Mr. Binnie’s bedchamber was neat,

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