The house was a red-brick mansion built for the residence of
an early Secretary of the Navy, and now made over into cheap flats. The
stately, old-fashioned place was surrounded by small shops and cheap,
dingy houses. "It makes me think," Miss Dorcas said with a sigh, "how
Jefferson would look to-day in a Democratic party meeting or Hamilton
among modern Republican politicians."
Anne didn't know who Hamilton was but she thought Jefferson, whose
picture hung in the sitting-room, looked as if he might have lived here.
It was a place still full of charm. In the rear of the mansion was an
old-fashioned flower garden with box-bordered gravel walks dividing the
formal beds and leading here to a stone seat, there to a broken
fountain. In the centre of the garden, was a sun-dial which a century
before told the shining hours; now, its days went in shadow under the
crowding trees,--a coffee-tree from Arabia, a mulberry from Spain, and
other relics of the wanderings of the long-ago secretary. Anne felt
like a bird in a nest as she sat on the roomy, white-columned porch
overlooking the garden, catching glimpses through a leafy screen of the
broad Potomac and the wooded hills of Virginia.
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