ow follow'd free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea."

The Ancient Mariner.

It was too late and too dark last night to see the old house at Stow. We
will look round us, then, this bright October day, while Sir Richard and
Amyas, about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, are pacing up and down the
terraced garden to the south. Amyas has slept till luncheon, i. e. till
an hour ago: but Sir Richard, in spite of the bustle of last night, was
up and in the valley by six o'clock, recreating the valiant souls of
himself and two terrier dogs by the chase of sundry badgers.

Old Stow House stands, or rather stood, some four miles beyond the
Cornish border, on the northern slope of the largest and loveliest of
those combes of which I spoke in the last chapter. Eighty years after
Sir Richard's time there arose there a huge Palladian pile, bedizened
with every monstrosity of bad taste, which was built, so the story runs,
by Charles the Second, for Sir Richard's great-grandson, the heir of
that famous Sir Bevil who defeated the Parliamentary troops at Stratton,
and died soon after, fighting valiantly at Lansdowne over Bath. But,
like most other things which owed their existence to the Stuarts,
it rose only to fall again. An old man who had seen, as a boy, the
foundation of the new house laid, lived to see it pulled down again,
and the very bricks and timber sold upon the spot; and since then the
stables have become a farm-house, the tennis-court a sheep-cote, the
great quadrangle a rick-yard; and civilization, spreading wave on
wave so fast elsewhere, has surged back from that lonely corner of the
land--let us hope, only for a while.

But I am not writing of that great new Stow House, of the past glories
whereof quaint pictures still hang in the neighboring houses; nor of
that famed Sir Bevil, most beautiful and gallant of his generation,
on whom, with his grandfather Sir Richard, old Prince has his pompous
epigram--

"Where next shall famous Grenvil's ashes stand?
Thy grandsire fills the sea, and thou the land."

I have to deal with a simpler age, and a sterner generation; and with
the old house, which had stood there, in part at least, from gray and
mythic ages, when the first Sir Richard, son of Hamon Dentatus, Lord of
Carboyle, the grandson of Duke Robert, son of Rou, settled at Bideford,
after slaying the Prince of South-Galis, and the Lord of Glamorgan, a