chimney-stacks, gables, mullioned windows, and oriels, rising from great sprawling box-trees and yews.  By a stroke of fortune, the young kindly squire was coming out at the gate as I stood gazing, and asked me if I would care to look round.  He led me up to the gate-house, and then into a great hall, with vast doors of oak, flagged with stone.  “There is our ugliest story!” he said, pointing to the flags.  I do not profess to explain what I saw; but there was in one place a stain looking like dark blood just sopped up; and close by, outlined in a damp dimness, the rough form of a human body with outstretched arms, just as though a warm corpse had been lying on the cold stones.  “That was where the young heir was killed by his father,” said the squire; “his blood fell down here—­he was stabbed in the back—­and he stumbled a pace or two and fell; we can’t scrub it out or dry it out.”  “I suppose you are haunted?” I said.  He laughed.  “Well,-it is a great convenience,” he said.  “I only live here in the summer; I have a little house which is more convenient in the winter, a little distance away.  I can never get a caretaker here for the winter—­but, bless you, if I left every door and window open, there is not a soul in the place that would come near it!” He led me through ranges of rooms panelled, recessed, orieled—­there were staircases, turret-chambers, galleries in every direction.  I think there must have been nearly fifty rooms in the house, perhaps half-a-dozen of them inhabited.  At one place he bade me look out of a little window, and I saw below a small court with an ancient chapel on the left, the windows bricked up.  It had a sinister and wicked air, somehow.  The squire told me that they had unearthed a dozen skeletons in that little yard as they were laying a drain, and had buried them in the neighbouring churchyard.  But the back of the house was still more ravishing than the front; surrounded by great brick walls, curving outwards, lay a grassy garden, with huge box-trees at the sides, and in the centre many ancient apple-trees in full bloom.  The place was bright with carelessly ordered flowers; and behind, the ground fell a little to some great pools full of sedge, some tumbled grassy hillocks covered with blackthorns, and a little wood red with buds and full of birds, called by the delicious name of “My Lord’s Wood.”  The great flat stretched for miles round.

One of the singular charms of the place was that it had never undergone a restoration; it had only been carefully patched just as it needed it.  I never saw a place so soaked with charm from end to end, its very wildness giving it a grace which trimness would have utterly destroyed.  I stood for a while beside the pool, with a woodpecker laughing in the holt, to watch the long roofs and huddled chimneys rise above the white-flowered orchard.  Perhaps in a stormy, rugged day of November it would be sad and mournful enough in its solitary pastures; but on this spring