supporters of the Carabas family. 'Give the
lodge-keeper a shilling,' says Ponto, (who drove me near to it in his
four-wheeled cruelty-chaise). 'I warrant it's the first piece of ready
money he has received for some time. I don't know whether there was any
foundation for this sneer, but the gratuity was received with a curtsey,
and the gate opened for me to enter. 'Poor old porteress!' says I,
inwardly. 'You little know that it is the Historian of Snobs whom you
let in!' The gates were passed. A damp green stretch of park spread
right and left immeasurably, confined by a chilly grey wall, and a damp
long straight road between two huge rows of moist, dismal lime-trees,
leads up to the Castle. In the midst of the park is a great black tank
or lake, bristling over with rushes, and here and there covered over
with patches of pea-soup. A shabby temple rises on an island in this
delectable lake, which is approached by a rotten barge that lies at
roost in a dilapidated boat house. Clumps of elms and oaks dot over the
huge green flat. Every one of them would have been down long since, but
that the Marquis is not allowed to cut the timber.

Up that long avenue the Snobographer walked in solitude. At the
seventy-ninth tree on the left-hand side, the insolvent butcher hanged
himself. I scarcely wondered at the dismal deed, so woful and sad were
the impressions connected with the place. So, for a mile and a half I
walked--alone and thinking of death.

I forgot to say the house is in full view all the way--except when
intercepted by the trees on the miserable island in the lake--an
enormous red-brick mansion, square, vast, and dingy. It is flanked by
four stone towers with weathercocks. In the midst of the grand facade is
a huge Ionic portico, approached by a vast, lonely, ghastly staircase.
Rows of black windows, framed in stone, stretch on either side, right
and left--three storeys and eighteen windows of a row. You may see
a picture of the palace and staircase, in the 'Views of England and
Wales,' with four carved and gilt carriages waiting at the gravel walk,
and several parties of ladies and gentlemen in wigs and hoops, dotting
the fatiguing lines of stairs.

But these stairs are made in great houses for people NOT to ascend. The
first Lady Carabas (they are but eighty years in the peerage), if she
got out of her gilt coach in a shower, would be wet to the skin before
she got half-way to the carved Ionic portico, where four