Were they French, or just aliens?

On vacation recently, we took time away from the beach to tour an old plantation home in Florida. The house had been built by a lumber baron in the late 1800s but had been extensively remodeled by a later owner to resemble an antebellum mansion.

I'm not a big fan of touring houses that make ours look puny by comparison, but the visit turned out to be informative. Two women guided us through the rooms, and in addition to my wife, children and granddaughters, the only other tourists were a couple and their daughter.

As we went from room to room, admiring the 18th-century mirrors and the Louis XVI sofas and the fancy library, we had a lot of questions. Why did the owner convert it from a perfectly respectable Victorian home to a pre-Civil War facsimile? Why did the windows stretch all the way to the floor? Where did they get all of Louis' furniture, and did he miss it? Things like that.

After awhile, we noticed the other family wasn't saying anything. Nothing. No questions. No comments. No whispering among themselves.

"Don't let us monopolize the questions," I told them. "Jump right in there."

They didn't reply, and for the rest of the tour, they said not a word.

Afterward, as we were driving back to the beach, we speculated on that family's silence. Someone in the car said they might have been French, and that when a tour guide said something about the French furniture, maybe it offended them and made them too angry to speak.

"The French!" someone else said. "Wouldn't you just know it?"

Or maybe they were aliens, we said, and they couldn't speak Earthling.

"I don't think so," I said. "I think they might have been time travelers from the future who came back to investigate the house for some reason and were hesitant to speak for fear they would give themselves away."

We thought about that for a while, and then we thought only about the sand and the sun and the waves and the dolphins.

Secretly, though, I continued to worry about those time travelers. When did they come from? What were they up to? Were they scoping out that house for any historical reason?

Maybe it had something to do with all that Louis XVI furniture - the second-largest collection of it in this country and the largest to be on public display, the guides had told us. Were they futuristic descendants of Louis - something like Louis XXXVIII - and did they want their ancestor's furnishings back?

Then again, maybe they were checking us out, because, after all, we were the only other people to take the tour.

If that were the case, then they could be watching us right there as we played in the surf, built sand castles and drank cool drinks.

Safe behind my sunglasses, I surreptitiously surveyed my surroundings. There were families, young couples, joggers and kayakers all around, but none appeared to be the French alien time travelers, or any combination thereof. If the visitors were there, they were doing a good job of hiding from us.

I relayed my concerns to my wife. She looked at me for a minute, glanced up toward the blazing Florida sun, then handed me her floppy hat.

"For goodness' sake, put this on," she said. "I think you need it worse than I do."

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.