I was enchanted with the place.  The quaint old Elizabethan gables and sombre bell-tower, the old-fashioned entrance gates, the luxuriant growth of ivy, combined together to give that air of peace, that charm which belongs so exclusively to the buildings of the middle ages.  Knowing that the house was for the time being unoccupied, I walked boldly into the outer porch, meaning to go no further.  But another inscription over the solid oak door encouraged me to enter: 

     “PORTA PATENS ESTO, NULLI CLAUDARIS HONESTO.”

I therefore opened the inner door with some difficulty, for it was heavy and cumbersome, and found myself in the hall.  Although nothing remarkable met my eye, I was delighted to find everything in keeping with the place.  The old-fashioned furniture, the old oak, the grim portraits and quaint heraldry, all were there.  I was much interested in some carved beams of black oak, which I afterwards learnt originally formed part of the magnificent roof of the village church.  When the roof was under repair a few years back, these beams were thrown aside as rotten and useless, and thus found their way into the manor house.  Every atom of genuine old work of this kind is deeply interesting, representing as it does the rude chiselling which hands that have long been dust in the village churchyard wrought with infinite pains.  That oak roof, carved in rich tracery, resting for ages on arcades of dog-tooth Norman and graceful Early English work, had echoed back the songs of praise and prayer that rose Sunday after Sunday from the lips of successive generations of simple country folk at matins and at evensong, before the strains of the Angelus had been hushed for ever by the Reformation.  And who can tell how long before the Conquest, and by what manner of men, were planted the trees destined to provide these massive beams of oak?

In the centre of the hall was a round table, with very ancient-looking, high-backed chairs scattered about, of all shapes and sizes.  Portraits of various degrees of indifferent oil painting adorned the walls of the hall and staircase.  Somebody appeared to have been shooting with a catapult at some of the pictures.  One old gentleman had a shot through his nose; and an old fellow with a hat on, over the window, had received a pellet in the right eye![1]

[Footnote 1:  The writer, in a fit of infantile insanity, being then aged about nine, was discovered in the very act of committing this assault on his ancestors some twenty years ago, in Hertfordshire.]

A copy of the Magna Charta, a suit of mediaeval armour, several rusty helmets (Cromwellian and otherwise), antlers of several kinds of deer, and a variety of old swords, pistols, and guns were the objects that chiefly attracted my attention.  The walls were likewise adorned with a large number of heraldic shields.