This is all very well until you see Harewood; for, substantial though
the house is, with its two-foot stone walls, it has but five rooms: two
downstairs and three up.
Where did they all sleep?
The question was put by the practical young lady whom I accompanied to
Harewood, but the wife of the farmer to whom the place is rented could
only smile and shake her head.
The bedroom now occupied by this farmer and his wife has doubtless been
occupied also by the first President of the United States and his wife,
the fourth President and his wife, by Lafayette, and by a King of
France--for Louis-Philippe, and his brothers, the Duc de Montpensier and
the Comte de Beaujolais, spent some time at Harewood during their period
of exile.
Having read in an extract from the Baltimore "Sun" that Harewood, which
is still owned in the Washington family, was a place in which all
Washingtons took great and proper pride, that it was "the lodestone
which draws the wandering Washingtons back to the old haunts," I was
greatly shocked on visiting the house to see the shameful state of
dilapidation into which it has been allowed to pass. The porches and
steps have fallen down, the garden is a disreputable tangle, and the
graves in the yard are heaped with tumble-down stones about which the
cattle graze.
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