outline of the Court, with its old-fashioned porch, its long
windows, and its tall, clustered chimneys towering in the distance. It
was the prettiest prospect in all Aberleigh.

The house itself retained strong marks of former stateliness, especially
in one projecting wing, too remote from the yard to be devoted to the
domestic purposes of the farmer's family. The fine proportions of the
lofty and spacious apartments, the rich mouldings of the ceilings, the
carved chimney-pieces, and the panelled walls, all attested the former
grandeur of the mansion; whilst the fragments of stained glass in the
windows of the great gallery, the half-effaced coats of arms over the
door-way, the faded family portraits, grim black-visaged knights,
and pale shadowy ladies, or the reliques of mouldering tapestry
that fluttered against the walls, and, above all, the secret chamber
constructed for the priest's hiding-place in days of Protestant
persecution, for in darker ages neither of the dominant churches was
free from that foul stain,--each of these vestiges of the manners and
the history of times long gone by appealed to the imagination, and
conspired to give a Mrs. Radcliffe-like, Castle-of-Udolpho-sort of
romance to the manor-house. Really, when the wind swept through the
overgrown espaliers of that neglected but luxuriant wilderness, the
terraced garden; when the screech-owl shrieked from the ivy which
clustered up one side of the walls, and "rats and mice, and such small
deer," were playing their pranks behind the wainscot, it would have
formed as pretty a locality for a supernatural adventure, as ever
decayed hunting lodge in the recesses of the Hartz, or ruined fortress
on the castled Rhine. Nothing was wanting but the ghost, and a ghost of
any taste would have been proud of such a habitation.

Less like a ghost than the inhabitant who did arrive, no human being
well could be.

Mrs. Cameron was a young widow. Her father, a Scotch officer, well-born,
sickly, and poor, had been but too happy to bestow the hand of his only
child upon an old friend and fellow-countryman, the principal clerk in
a government office, whose respectable station, easy fortune, excellent
sense, and super-excellent character, were, as he thought, and as
fathers, right or wrong, are apt to think, advantages more than
sufficient to counterbalance a disparity of years and appearance,
which some daughters might have thought startling,--the bride being
a beauti