opening of a door into paradise.
Day after day the fields have lain calm beneath a cool and tranquil
sun, with a light breeze shifting from point to point in the compass.
Day after day I have swept along the great fen-roads, descending from
my little hill-range into the flat. Day by day I have steered slowly
across the gigantic plains, with the far-off farms to left and right
across acres of dark plough-land, rising in dust from the feet of
horses dragging a harrow. Every now and then one crosses a great dyke,
a sapphire streak of calm water between green flood-banks, running as
straight as a line from horizon to horizon. One sweeps through a pretty
village at long intervals, with its comfortable yellow-brick houses,
and an old church standing up grey in the sun. It was on a day always
to be marked with letters of gold in my calendar that I found the house
of Bellasyze in a village in the fen. Imagine a great red-brick wall
running along by the high road, with a pair of huge gate-posts in the
centre, with big stone wyverns on the top. Inside, a little park of
ancient trees, standing up among grass golden with buttercups. A
quarter of a mile away in the park, an incredibly picturesque house of
red brick, with an ancient turreted gate-house, innumerable brick
chimney-stacks, gables, mullioned windows, and oriels, rising from
great sprawling box-trees and yews. By a stroke of fortune, the young
kindly squire was coming out at the gate as I stood gazing, and asked
me if I would care to look round. He led me up to the gate-house, and
then into a great hall, with vast doors of oak, flagged with stone.
"There is our ugliest story!" he said, pointing to the flags. I do not
profess to explain what I saw; but there was in one place a stain
looking like dark blood just sopped up; and close by, outlined in a
damp dimness, the rough form of a human body with outstretched arms,
just as though a warm corpse had been lying on the cold stones. "That
was where the young heir was killed by his father," said the squire;
"his blood fell down here--he was stabbed in the back--and he stumbled
a pace or two and fell; we can't scrub it out or dry it out." "I
suppose you are haunted?" I said. He laughed. "Well,-it is a great
convenience," he said. "I only live here in the summer; I have a little
house which is more convenient in the winter, a little distance away. I
can never get a caretaker here for the winter--but, bless you, if I
left every do