There were chased goblets , also , and tureens , salvers , dinner-dishes and dish-covers of gold or silver-gilt , besides chains and other jewels , incalculably rich , though tarnished with the damps of the vault ; for , of all the wealth that was irrevocably lost to man , whether buried in the earth or sunken in the sea , Peter Goldthwaite had found it in this one treasure-place . Anon he had returned to the old house as poor as ever , and was received at the door by the gaunt and grizzled figure of a man whom he might have mistaken for himself , only that his garments were of a much elder fashion . But the house , without losing its former aspect , had been changed into a palace of the precious metals . The floors , walls and ceilings were of burnished silver ; the doors , the window-frames , the cornices , the balustrades and the steps of the staircase , of pure gold ; and silver , with gold bottoms , were the chairs , and gold , standing on silver legs , the high chests of drawers , and silver the bedsteads , with blankets of woven gold and sheets of silver tissue . The house had evidently been transmuted by a single touch , for it retained all the marks that Peter remembered , but in gold or silver instead of wood , and the initials of his name -- which when a boy he had cut in the wooden door-post -- remained as deep in the pillar of gold . A happy man would have been Peter Goldthwaite except for a certain ocular deception which , whenever he glanced backward , caused the house to darken from its glittering magnificence into the sordid gloom of yesterday . Up betimes rose Peter , seized an axe , hammer and saw which he had placed by his bedside , and hied him to the garret . It was but scantily lighted up as yet by the frosty fragments of a sunbeam which began to glimmer through the almost opaque bull-eyes of the window . A moralizer might find abundant themes for his speculative and impracticable wisdom in a garret . There is the limbo of departed fashions , aged trifles of a day and whatever was valuable only to one generation of men , and which passed to the garret when that generation passed to the grave -- not for safekeeping , but to be out of the way . Peter saw piles of yellow and musty account-books in parchment covers , wherein creditors long dead and buried had written the names of dead and buried debtors in ink now so faded that their moss-grown tombstones were more legible . He found old moth-eaten garments , all in rags and tatters , or Peter would have put them on . Here was a naked and rusty sword -- not a sword of service , but a gentleman 's small French rapier -- which had never left its scabbard till it lost it . Here were canes of twenty different sorts , but no gold-headed ones , and shoebuckles of various pattern and material , but not silver nor set with precious stones . Here was a large box full of shoes with high heels and peaked toes . Here , on a shelf , were a multitude of phials half filled with old apothecary 's stuff which , when the other half had done its business on Peter 's ancestors , had been brought hither from the death-chamber . Here -- not to give a longer inventory of articles that will never be put up at auction -- was the fragment of a full-length looking-glass which by the dust and dimness of its surface made the picture of these old things look older than the reality . When Peter , not knowing that there was a mirror there , caught the faint traces of his own figure , he partly imagined that the former Peter Goldthwaite had come back either to assist or impede his search for the hidden wealth . And at that moment a strange notion glimmered through his brain that he was the identical Peter who had concealed the gold , and ought to know whereabout it lay . This , however , he had unaccountably forgotten .
`` Well , Mr. XXXXX ! ''
Anon Peter bedsteads bull-eyes death-chamber left phials sunbeam tatters whereabout