ering cones like funeral
candles in sconces. What had been a lake with fountains was a great,
cracked basin of concrete tarnished with scabious pools thick with the
dead leaves of many an autumn.

Barstow entered a fallen gate and walked along paths where his feet
slashed through barbaric tangles clutching at him like fingers. As he
prowled, wondering what splendor this could have been which was so
misplaced in so dull a town and drooping into so early a neglect, birds
took alarm and went crying through the branches. There were lithe
escapes through the grass, and from the rim of the lake ugly toads
plounced into the pool and set the water-spiders scurrying on their
frail catamarans.

Two bronze stags towered knee-deep in verdure; one had a single antler,
the other none. A pair of toothless lions brooded over their lost
dignity. Between their disconsolate sentry, mounted flight on flight of
marble steps to the house of the manor. It lay like an old frigate
storm-shattered and flung aground to rot. The hospitable doors were
planked shut, the windows, too; the floors of the verandas were broken
and the roof was everywhere sunken and insecure.

At the portal had stood two nymphs, now almost classic with decay. One
of them, toppling helplessly, quenched her bronze torch in weeds. Her
sister stood erect in grief like a daughter of Niobe wept into stone.

The scene somehow reminded Barstow of one of Poe's landscapes. It was
the corpse of a home. Eventually he noticed a tall woman in black,
seated on a bench and gazing down the terraces across the dead lake.
Barstow was tempted to ask her whose place this had been and what its
history was, but her mien and her crepe daunted him.

He made his way out of the region, looking back as he went. When he
approached the most neighboring house a grocery-wagon came flying down
the road. Before it stopped the slanted driver was off the seat and
half-way across the yard. In a moment he was back again. Barstow called
out:

"Whose place is that?"

"Shelby's."

"Did he move away?"

But the horse was already in motion, and the youth had darted after,
leaping to the side of the seat and calling back something which Barstow
could not hear.

Shelby, who had given the town everything he could, had even endowed it
with a ruins.

When Barstow had reached the hotel again he went in to his supper. A
head waitress, chewing gum, took him to a table where a wildly coiffed
damsel brought h