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house itself remained unoccupied, slowly deteriorating in the peace and solitude of the two-acre, overgrown, brambled lawn.
    Crossett stood studying the shadowy molding as he struck a match to light his cigarette. It snapped and hissed in the cold as it ignited, illuminating Crossett’s white, cold breath. For the most part he had left the house of his ancestors alone, but here and there, overcome by temptation, he had imported from other great houses in the area architectural embellishments. The Wetherton molding was one such example. The mantel in the library was another. It had come from the home of Robert Wighte (or so Crossett liked to think) and dated to the 1790’s with its stepped and molded shelf, its fluted sides. It had been its simplicity that had allured Crossett when he first saw it at an estate sale last summer, that and the auctioneer’s claim that it had come from the Wighte home. Twynne—the resident local historian, a Ph.D. in American history, his private docent through the history of the region—grunted as he studied the mantel on Crossett’s behalf, then proclaimed that whether of not it came from the Wighte mansion it was authentically of the Federal period and held some value.
    “ That’s about the only house around here we haven’t been in,” Twynne said  as he clapped Crossett on the back. It was true. Since their youth the two friends had investigated scores of abandoned old homes in the area and beyond. As boys they would go wherever they could walk, later wherever they could ride their bicycles along the winding, narrow country roads, dodging the sharecroppers on their tractors carrying piles of cut tobacco to barns spread out over the farms along the way, racing with the steamy August air for who would win the heat. It was always great sport to climb over the briars and underbrush that had grown up around most of these houses, find a broken window or a hapless, gaping door and go in. Sometimes broken pieces of furniture still lay around, bits and pieces of rubble on the floors. At other times the house was as empty as a tobacco barn after the hogsheads had gone to the warehouse. It was in just such barren houses to which all that was left to stir the imagination was the beauty of their architecture—their moldings and railings and mantels—that gave Crossett the idea of transplanting their parts, thus to salvage something of their glamorous youth faded now with time and overcast with the dusty gloom of misfortune.
    Crossett knew where the Wighte house was, so overgrown now since his boyhood days when a mosaic of it could be seen through the intertwining branches that veiled it from the road. His father used to point it out to him frequently along with many of the other old houses in the area, both inhabited and not.
    Whatever its genealogy, the old mantel must have had a busy history, for he had gotten five layers of paint off it—Indian red, yellow, cream, steel blue, and a most aggressive shade of green. Now it was rose to match the native molding of the room as well as the large, fringed Oriental rug whose now-muted reds blended.
    The chair rail in the dining room was another imported ornamentation. It had witnessed many a sumptuous feast at Farrington Hall, home of the Hereford famil y from 1733 to 1944 when, crippled by the great Depression and finally crushed by the demands of the second world war, the family fortune had been drained and the estate lost. His father had been alive then and Crossett had persuaded him to procure the chair railing, which he had promised he would install himself. His father did procure the railing but forbade Crossett to put it up because he said his dining room was dignified enough just the way it was. Crossett could still see the piles of folded laundry on the table of that room even as his father delivered this edict.
    Upstairs it was the wallpaper in his bedroom that he had brought from another house, the Teilbiright mansion of Widow Grove. It