either side by terraced lawns of ancient and close-napped turf, intersected at intervals by gravel walks, and turning sharply to the right, follows a long box hedge once cut into tall and fantastic shapes. But it seems long to have lacked the shears and pruning hand, for all precision of outline has been lost, and what were once the formal figures of bird and beast have swelled into monstrous masses of deformed shape, wrought, you would think, by the imagination of a night hag into things inhuman. Here, as seen in the dim light, a thin neck would bulge into some ghastliness of a head, hydrocephalous or tumoured with long-standing disease; here a bird with dwindled body and scarecrow wings[Pg 3] stood on the legs of a colossus; here conjecture would vainly seek for a reconstruction.

[Pg 3]

The end of one of the wings of the house, which was built round three sides of a quadrangle, abutted on to this hedge so closely that a peacock with thick, bloated tail, peered into the gun-room window; in the centre of the gravel sweep rose a bronze Triton fountain bearded, like an old man, with long dependence of icicle. A bitter north wind had accompanied the early days of the frost, and this icy fringe had grown out sideways from the lip of the basin, blown aside even as it congealed. Flower beds, a ribbon of dark, untenanted earth, ran underneath the windows, which rose in three stories, small-paned and Jacobean. As dark fell, lights sprang out in the walls as the stars in the field of heaven, but to right and left of the front door there came through a row of windows, yet uncurtained, a redder and less constant gleam than the shining of oil or wax, now growing, now diminishing, leaping out at one moment to a great vividness, at the next suddenly dying down again, so that in the corners of the room there was a continual battle of shadows. Now, as the flames from the wood burning on the great open hearth grew dim, whole battalions of them would collect and gather again; with the kindling of some fresh stuff, they would be routed and disappear. This fitfulness of illumination played also strange tricks with the tapestries that hung on two of the four sides of the hall; figures started suddenly into being and were[Pg 4] blotted out before the eye had clearly visualized them, and in the inconstancy of the light a nervous man might say to himself that stir and movement were going on among them; again they rode to hounds, or took the jesses off the hawk.

[Pg 4]

The present is the heir of all the achievement of former ages, and while this great house with its mile-long avenue, 

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