.

At the south end of the Abbey House itself lay a small grass plot and
pleasure-garden fringed with shrubberies, and adorned with two fine
cedar-trees. One of these trees was at its further extremity, and
under it there ran a path cut through the dense shrubbery. This path,
which was edged with limes and called the "Tunnel Walk," led to the
lake, and debouched in the little glade where stood Caresfoot's Staff.
The lake itself was a fine piece of water, partly natural and partly
constructed by the monks, measuring a full mile round, and from fifty
to two hundred yards in width. It was in the shape of a man's shoe,
the heel facing west like the house, but projecting beyond it, the
narrow part representing the hollow of the instep, being exactly
opposite to it, and the sole swelling out in an easterly direction.

Bratham Abbey was altogether a fine old place, but the most remarkable
thing about it was its air of antiquity and the solemnity of its
peace. It did not, indeed, strike the spirit with that religious awe
which is apt to fall upon us as we gaze along the vaulted aisles of
great cathedrals, but it appealed perhaps with equal strength to the
softer and more reflective side of our nature. For generation after
generation that house had been the home of men like ourselves; they
had passed and were forgotten, but it remained, the sole witness of
the stories of their lives. Hands of which the very bones had long
since crumbled into dust had planted those old oaks and walnuts, that
still donned their green robes in summer, and shed them in the autumn,
to stand great skeletons through the winter months, awaiting the
resurrection of the spring.

There lay upon the place and its surroundings a burden of dead lives,
intangible, but none the less real. The air was thick with memories,
as suggestive as the grey dust in a vault. Even in the summer, in the
full burst of nature revelling in her strength, the place was sad. But
in the winter, when the wind came howling through the groaning trees,
and drove the grey scud across an ashy sky, when the birds were dumb,
and there were no cattle on the sodden lawn, its isolated melancholy
was a palpable thing.

That hoary house might have been a gateway of the dim land we call the
Past, looking down in stony sorrow on the follies of those who so soon
must cross its portals, and, to the wise who could hear the lesson,
pregnant with echoes of the warning voices of many generations.