. Jones's Creek circling
past it, and hardly noticed a long band of creeping men and animals
steal up from the Meeting House branch, past the tannery and the
academy, and plunge into the back streets of the place, avoiding the
public square.

One file turned down to the creek and crossed it, to return farther
above, cutting off all escape by the northern road, while a second file
slipped silently through and around the compact little hamlet and waited
for the other to arrive, when both encompassed an old brick dwelling
standing back from the roadside in a green and venerable yard, nearly
half a mile from the settled parts of Dover.

This house was brilliantly lighted, and the rose-bushes and shade trees
were all defined as they stood above the swells of green verdure and the
ornamental paths and flower-beds.

One majestic tulip-tree extended its long branches nearly to the portal
of the quaint dwelling, and a luxuriant growth of ivy, starting between
the cellar windows, clambered to the corniced carpentry of the eaves,
and made almost solid panels of vine of the spaces between the four
large, keystoned windows in two stories, which stood to the right of the
broad, dumpy door.

This door, at the top of a flight of steps, was placed so near the gable
angle of the house that it gave the impression of but one wing of a
mansion originally designed to be twice its length and size.

Between this gable--which faced the road, and had four lines of windows
in it, besides a basement row--and the back or town door, as described,
was one squarish, roomy window, out of relation to all the rest, and
perhaps twelve feet above the ground. This, as might be guessed, was on
the landing of the stairs within; for the great door and front of the
residence being at the opposite side, the whole of the space at the
townward gable, to the width of seventeen feet, was a noble hall about
forty feet long, lofty, and with pilasters in architectural style, and
lighted by two great windows in the gable and the square window on the
stairway.

The stairway itself was a beautiful piece of work and proportion, rising
from the floor in ten railed steps to the landing at the square window,
where a space several feet square commanded both the great front door
and the windows in the gable, and also the yard behind; thence, at right
angles, the flight of steps rose along the back wall to a second landing
over the dumpy back-door, and, by a third leap, r