But this is a digression. The only connection of the Nantucket branch with Newbury is that old Tristram lived there for a brief period, before repairing to his island home, and his son (the younger of the name of Tristram, the family name of a grandmother) and his posterity occupied the old mansion down through seven or eight generations, and still dwell beneath its roof. At the time of its erection the edifice must have been among the most elegant, as its good state of preservation proves it to have been one of the most substantial of its day, when the notion, prevailing in England, that oak was the most suitable material of the forest for dwellings, governed in their choice, with less reason, our American planters. It was built in the mode common to the period, round a vast brick chimney-stack, ten or twelve feet square. The principal apartment, now divided into two, possessed, as did also the kitchen, one of those spacious fireplaces which are the marvel and envy of these degenerate days, when a hole in the carpet has superseded in many households the family hearth. It is pleasant to think of the groups that in the olden time clustered around them; charming people, whom we know by tradition, and who are remembered by many associations.
The house possesses various other apartments of size and pretension, and has answered well the needs of the successive generations that have occupied it, not only as a spacious and commodious abode, but one sufficiently elegant to satisfy the advancing standards of taste and refinement. Among the marked features of the building are several small casements, lighting closets and staircases, which give variety to the monotonous symmetry of windows all of a size, one on top of another, and where all the openings for egress or light are in straight lines and of equal dimensions. It is many years since my visit, and I hope you will see it, for much that was peculiar, and made a weird impression at the time, has passed out of mind. If the trickles in my own veins do not mislead, the present proprietors will be glad to have pleasure afforded to the reading community, even by this inadequate description of a house which has such claims to be known, if, as you intimate, you purpose to place this account of it in your Appendix. They will not consider it a liberty if I repeat what some one not long since told me of an interesting relic of the past discovered on its walls, a statement which might be related almost in the same words of the house of MacPhædrics at Portsmouth.