or and window open, there is not a soul in the place that
would come near it!" He led me through ranges of rooms panelled,
recessed, orieled--there were staircases, turret-chambers, galleries in
every direction. I think there must have been nearly fifty rooms in the
house, perhaps half-a-dozen of them inhabited. At one place he bade me
look out of a little window, and I saw below a small court with an
ancient chapel on the left, the windows bricked up. It had a sinister
and wicked air, somehow. The squire told me that they had unearthed a
dozen skeletons in that little yard as they were laying a drain, and
had buried them in the neighbouring churchyard. But the back of the
house was still more ravishing than the front; surrounded by great
brick walls, curving outwards, lay a grassy garden, with huge box-trees
at the sides, and in the centre many ancient apple-trees in full bloom.
The place was bright with carelessly ordered flowers; and behind, the
ground fell a little to some great pools full of sedge, some tumbled
grassy hillocks covered with blackthorns, and a little wood red with
buds and full of birds, called by the delicious name of "My Lord's
Wood." The great flat stretched for miles round.

One of the singular charms of the place was that it had never undergone
a restoration; it had only been carefully patched just as it needed it.
I never saw a place so soaked with charm from end to end, its very
wildness giving it a grace which trimness would have utterly destroyed.
I stood for a while beside the pool, with a woodpecker laughing in the
holt, to watch the long roofs and huddled chimneys rise above the
white-flowered orchard. Perhaps in a stormy, rugged day of November it
would be sad and mournful enough in its solitary pastures; but on this
spring day, with the sun lying warm on the brickwork, it seemed to have
a perfection of charm about it like the design of a mind intent upon
devising as beautiful a thing as could be made. The old house seemed to
have grown old and mellow like a rock or crag; to have sprung up out of
the ground; and nature, working patiently with rain and sun and wind,
drooping the stonecrop from the parapet, fringing the parapets with
snapdragons and wallflowers, touching the old roofs with orange and
grey lichens, had done the rest. No one shall learn from me where the
House of Bellasyze lies; but I will revisit it spring by spring, like a
hidden treasure of beauty.

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