Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/179

 THE JAFFREY MANSION.

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��At the JalTrey mansion there was high living and kixurious style. The councillor hail a fine dinner set of pewter, ordered from England. He also had a valuable India China set, and a large quantity of silver. A tankard, holding a gallon or more, he devoted exclusively to hot punch. Much of the silver not only bore the "tower stamp," but had also his own coat of arms engraved on it. The councillor wore diamonds on great occasions. His furniture was heavy and costly. One piece was an old clock, seven feet in height, made in London in 1677, and owned by the first George Jaffrey. The case is of English oak, handsomely veneered ; the key to wind it up is of fanciful workmanship, and is probably an imitation of that of the holy house of Loretto. The old clock stood in the Jaffrey house from the time of its erection until the death of the third George, when it was sold, Timothy Ham being the purchaser. It is now the property of his grandson, Francis W. Ham, on Elm street, and is still in order, noting the passing hours with the same reg- ularity that the earth rolls upon its axis.

The two councillors Jaffrey, father and son, were buried in St. John's churchyard, where sleep many others of the colonial magnates prior to the Revolution — staunch, royalty-loving governors, councillors, and secretaries of the province of New Hampshire, all snugly gathered under the motherly wing of the Church of England. One can move in the best of society in this place. Here lies the eponymous hero of many a New Hampshire town. Two Governor Wentworths and their families occupy one tomb, and around them, under faded escutcheons and crumbling armorial devices, are the ashes of Atkinsons, Warners, Sheafs, Sherburns, and Jaffreys. You cannot walk anywhere without treading on one of his majesty's colonels or a secretary under the crown. They led their lives of splendor and renown, and now a few feet of ground is all they can call their own.

��" Shall we builil Ambition ! Ah no; Ai't'righted it .slirinketh away, And nothing- is left but the dust below, And the tinsel that shines on the dark coffin lid."

George Jaffrey, the fourth, he who relinquished the name of Jeft>ies to inherit the noble cognomen and im- mense property of the oltl councillor, occupied the mansion from the time of his maturity to his death, in 1S56. He followed the condition. of the will to the letter, living the life of a gsn- ileinan, an easy, luxurious, cultivated man, who made no stir in the world beyond his own immediate circle. As he left no son nor estate to continue the name, the line of George Jaffreys closed with him. Col. John Good- rich purchased the mansion, and his heirs at present occupy it.

We stood gazing at the old house, long after we went out from it. How fair it must have looked to its lords in the old time, with the sunlight of the budding summer on its white walls and green gardens, before it was crowded in by smaller and inferior buildings. It was a noble ancestral home indeed, and no wonder the form- er masters, blas^ from visits to Boston and Salem, hastened to their stately residence glad of the repose and lux- ury it offered them.

Slowly we turned from the house and walked across the street, leaving the grand old pile behind us, standing on its knoll of velvet turf, with its famous lindens closing around it and waving their green tree-tops up to the blue, clear heavens above — a home worthy of a noble line, now left to strangers' hands, in all its stately beauty — with its legends of antiquity, and its memories of glory and great- ness. Cowper's well known lines came to us with a force we had never felt before :

" Meditations here May think down hours to moments.

Here the heart May give a useful lesson to the head, And learning, wiser grow, without his

books !"

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