some ducal
residence the plan of Teackle Hall, as Judge Custis found it on his
coming into the property.

It was nearly two hundred feet in length, and would have made three
respectable churches, standing in line, with their sharp gables to the
front, the bold wings connected with the bolder centre by habitable
curtains or colonnades, in which panels of slate or grained stone made
an attic story above the lines of windows, and lintels and sills of the
same stone, with high keystones, capped every window in the many-sided
surface of the whole stately block, all built of brick brought over in
vessels from the western shore, or possibly from the North, or Europe,
and painted a gray stone color.

Its central gable had deep carved eaves, and a pediment-base to shed
rain, and a large circular window in that pediment. The two mighty
chimneys of that centre were parallel with the ridge of the roof, and
rose nearly from the middle of the two opposite slopes, bespeaking four
great fireplaces below, and a flat, low-galleried observatory upon the
roof gave views of portions of the bay on clear days.

The wings of Teackle Hall had similar, but lower, chimneys, astraddle of
their roofs, and forest trees--oak, gum, holly, and pine, with a great
willow, and some tawny cedars, and bushes of rose and lilac--dotted the
grassy lawn. The Virginia creeper and wild ivy climbed here and there to
the upper windows, and a tall, broad, panelled doorway, opening on a
low, open portico platform with steps, seemed to say to visitors: "Men
of port and consideration come in this way, but inferiors enter by some
of the smaller doors!"

Levin Dennis, who had never sounded that knocker, though he had often
taken his terrapins to the kitchen, stared in concern at the door where
it was reported Meshach Milburn had gone in, and would hardly have been
surprised if that intruder had now appeared at one of the three deep
windows over the door with a firebrand in his hand.

Levin muttered to himself: "Rich folks, I reckon, must make a trade.
Maybe it's hosses--maybe not. I know it ain't hats."

He then turned down to the Episcopal Church, only a square from Teackle
Hall, and on a street between it and the main street, though in a
retired situation, its front turned from the town, and looking over the
fields and farms, like a good pastor who is warming at the fire with his
hands behind him.

A single-storied, long, low edifice of British bricks, with it