f the spectator.

Three miles passed, the lane takes a sudden turn to the northward,
having previously run, for the most part, east and west; and here, in
the inner angle, jutting out suddenly from a dense thicket of
hawthorns and hazels, an old octagonal summer-house, with a roof
shaped like an extinguisher, projects into the ditch, which here
expands into a little pool, some ten or twelve yards over in every
direction, and perhaps deeper than at any other point of its course.

Beyond the summer-house there is a little esplanade of green turf,
faced with a low wall toward the ditch, allowing the eye to run down a
long, narrow avenue of gigantic elm-trees, meeting at the top in the
perfect semblance of a Gothic aisle, and bordered on each hand by
hedges of yew, six feet at least in height, clipped into the form and
almost into the solidity of a wall. At the far end of this avenue,
which must be nearly two-thirds of a mile in length, one can discern a
glimpse of a formal garden, and beyond that, of some portion of what
seems to be a large building of red brick.

At the extremity of the esplanade and little wall, there grows an
enormous oak, not very tall, but with an immense girth of trunk, and
such a spread of branches that it completely overshadows the
summer-house, and overhangs the whole surface of the small pool in
front of it. Thenceforth, the tall and tangled hedge runs on, as usual
denying all access of the eye, and the deep, clear ditch all access of
the foot, to the demesnes within; until at the distance of perhaps a
mile and a quarter, a little bridge crosses the latter, and a green
gate, with a pretty rustic lodge beside it, gives entrance to a smooth
lawn, with a gravel-road running across it, and losing itself on the
farther side, in a thick belt of woodland.

It is, however, with the summer-house that I have to do principally,
for it is to it that the terror of blood has clung through the lapse
of years, as the scent of the Turkish Atar is said to cling,
indestructible, to the last fragment of the vessel which had once
contained it.

When first I saw that small lonely pavilion, I had heard nothing of
the strange tradition which belonged to it, yet as I looked on the
plastered walls, all covered with spots of damp and mildew, on the
roof overrun with ivy, in masses so wildly luxuriant as almost to
conceal the shape, on the windows, one in each side of the octagon,
closed by stout jalousies, which had