to the right
were the stables, large and handsome too, with a clock-tower and a belfry
over the gateway; and to the left were the gardens and the shrubberies.

There had been an old house once at Shadonake, old and picturesque and
uncomfortable; but when the property had been purchased by the present
owner--Mr. Andrew Miller--after he had been returned as Conservative
member for the county, the old house was swept away, and a modern
mansion, more suited to the wants and requirements of his family, arose
in its place.

The park was flat, but well wooded. The old trees, of course, remained
intact; but the gardens of the first house, being rambling and
old-fashioned, had been done away with, to make room for others on a
larger and more imposing scale; and vineries and pineries, orchid-houses,
and hot-houses of every description arose rapidly all over the site of
the old bowling-green and the wilderness, half kitchen garden, half
rosary, that had served to content the former owners of Shadonake, now
all lying dead and buried in the chancel of the village church.

The only feature of the old mansion which had been left untouched was
rather a remarkable one. It was a large lake or pond, lying south of the
gardens, and about a quarter of a mile from the house. It lay in a sort
of dip in the ground, and was surrounded on all four sides--for it was
exactly square--by very steep high banks, which had been cut into by
steep stone steps, now gray, and broken, and moss-grown, which led down
straight into the water. This pool was called Shadonake Bath. How long
the steps had existed no one knew; probably for several hundred years,
for there was a ghost story connected with them. Somebody was supposed,
before the memory of any one living, to have been drowned there, and to
haunt the steps at certain times of the year.

It is certain that but for the fact of a mania for boating, and punting,
and skating indulged in by several of his younger sons, Mr. Miller, in
his energy for sweeping away all things old, and setting up all things
new, would not have spared the Bath any more than he had spared the
bowling-green. He had gone so far, indeed, as to have a plan submitted to
him for draining it, and turning it into a strawberry garden, and for
doing away with the picturesque old stone steps altogether in order to
encase the banks in red brick, suitable to the cultivation of peaches and
nectarines; but Ernest and Charley, the Eton boys,