d
groin-work, encasing within a Tudor arch a door of the comfortable date
of George III., and the peculiarly dingy and weather-stained appearance
of the small finely-finished bricks, of which the habitation was
built,--all showed the abode of former generations adapted with
tasteless irreverence to the habits of descendants unenlightened by
Pugin, or indifferent to the poetry of the past. The house had emerged
suddenly upon Frank out of the gloomy waste land, for it was placed in
a hollow, and sheltered from sight by a disorderly group of ragged,
dismal, valetudinarian fir-trees, until an abrupt turn of the
road cleared that screen, and left the desolate abode bare to the
discontented eye. Frank dismounted; the man held his pony; and after
smoothing his cravat, the smart Etonian sauntered up to the door, and
startled the solitude of the place with a loud peal from the modern
brass knocker,--a knock which instantly brought forth an astonished
starling who had built under the eaves of the gable roof, and called up
a cloud of sparrows, tomtits, and yellow-hammers, who had been regaling
themselves amongst the litter of a slovenly farmyard that lay in full
sight to the right of the house, fenced off by a primitive paintless
wooden rail. In process of time a sow, accompanied by a thriving and
inquisitive family, strolled up to the gate of the fence, and, leaning
her nose on the lower bar of the gate, contemplated the visitor with
much curiosity and some suspicion.

While Frank is still without, impatiently swingeing his white trousers
with his whip, we will steal a hurried glance towards the respective
members of the family within. Mr. Leslie, the paterfamilias, is in a
little room called his "study," to which he regularly retires every
morning after breakfast, rarely reappearing till one o'clock, which is
his unfashionable hour for dinner. In what mysterious occupations
Mr. Leslie passes those hours no one ever formed a conjecture. At the
present moment he is seated before a little rickety bureau, one leg of
which being shorter than the other is propped up by sundry old letters
and scraps of newspapers; and the bureau is open, and reveals a great
number of pigeonholes and divisions, filled with various odds and ends,
the collection of many years. In some of these compartments are bundles
of letters, very yellow, and tied in packets with faded tape; in
another, all by itself, is a fragment of plum-pudding stone, which Mr.
Le