The Last Adam Read Online Free PDF Page A

years. Since it was not down on the green, it was as good as forgotten when a Mr. Rosenthal happened on it. Mr. Rosenthal was excited. Janet herself said that she thought he was going to have a stroke when she told him anything he wanted was for sale.
    Recovering, Mr. Rosenthal had wanted a good part of the furniture in the front rooms. Plainly he would have liked the whole house, but since that was impractical, he took mantelpieces and panelling. Carefully and expertly, men he brought up for the purpose removed the long curved stair rail in the hall. They took the semicircular porch with four thin white columns; door, lintel, fanlight, and the beautiful scrolled ironwork done by a blind German at the long-gone New Winton Furnace forge. Mr. Rosenthal gladly had his carpenters build Janet a new door at no expense to her. The truth was, he paid very well for what he took.
    Now, led of course by Mrs. Banning, came the uproar. No possibility of doing it remained, but warm talk turned on the advisability of buying so fine and historic a mansion. A queer creature like Miss Cardmaker actually had no right to it; it belonged to posterity. Most of the uproar necessarily subsided when Mr. Rosenthal, personally supervising every operation, departed for New York, shepherding a truckful of spoils. The victory was his, if one excepted the spectacular triumph of Henry Harris, then a Justice of the Peace.
    No one in the village was too humble, or too indifferent to resent (once told of what it consisted) this brigandage; but only Mr. Harris could find effective expression for the feeling. After consulting the town records he was able to announce that if Mr. Rosenthal was so keen on antiques, here was another for him. It was an ordinance passed in 1803. It provided a fine of twenty-five dollars for trespassing on the village green by a non-resident without written permission from a selectman. Once it had served to keep itinerant pedlars from camping there. Henry Harris guessed that it would apply just as much to Mr. Rosenthal, seen to be impudently walking round the old Congregational church which stood on this public land. Mr. Harris sent for Lester Dunn, one of the constables, and Lester went and arrested Mr. Rosenthal, who was examining the edifice with painstaking appreciation. Mr. Harris read him the regulation. If Mr. Rosenthal didn't think it applied to him, he'd better send for his lawyers and let them show Mr. Harris why not. Mr. Rosenthal paid. There were, he remarked, somewhat redder in the face but quiet and patient, many quaint and interesting things to-be found in the old records.
     
     
     
    Mrs. Banning, Doctor Bull guessed, was having quite a time, since in natural operation the course of events went against her. She got there late in the process. In 1774, nine hundred more people lived in New Winton than lived there now. They must have lived in houses; but only three of the houses they could have lived in were left—what they would have called the new Cardmaker house was almost twenty years in the future as they saw it. Changes and accidents which had reduced the count of eighteenth-century houses to four, would naturally proceed until there were none. The Bannings had two of them—that was, their own large house had been developed out of one and then restored back as far as practicable, and they owned the little Allen house, which, figured in all books on the subject, across the way. George Bull knew that they coveted the Bull house; but their hostility to him personally kept them from making an offer. If Mrs. Cole—Aunt Myra— died, he wouldn't mind selling it—he supposed it would have to be to the Bannings; but, he reflected, grinning, not before he'd made an effort to find a wealthy Jew who might like to buy it—to live in, that was, not to take away. Mrs. Banning, bristling with upper middle-class New England abhorrence of New York Jews, would do some squirming then. That would really get her. He could imagine