th of those same fir trees, and for
the fact that bears and bear-pit had long given place to race-horses
and to a great square of stable buildings in the hollow lying back from
the main road across the park, Brockhurst was substantially the same in
the year of grace 1842, when this truthful history actually opens, as
it had been when Sir Denzil's workmen set the last tier of bricks of
the last twisted chimney-stack in its place. The grand, simple masses
of the house--Gothic in its main lines, but with much of Renaissance
work in its details--still lent themselves to the same broad effects of
light and shadow, as it crowned the southern and western sloping
hillside amid its red-walled gardens and pepper-pot summer-houses, its
gleaming ponds and watercourses, its hawthorn dotted paddocks; its
ancient avenues of elm, of lime, and oak. The same panelings and
tapestries clothed the walls of its spacious rooms and passages; the
same quaint treasures adorned its fine Italian cabinets; the same air
of large and generous comfort pervaded it. As the child of true lovers
is said to bear through life, in a certain glad beauty of person and of
nature, witness to the glad hour of its conception, so Brockhurst, on
through the accumulating years, still bore witness to the fortunate
historic hour in which it was planned.

Yet, since in all things material and mortal there is always a little
spot of darkness, a germ of canker, at least the echo of a cry of
fear--lest life being too sweet, man should grow proud to the point of
forgetting he is, after all, but a pawn upon the board, but the sport
and plaything of destiny and the vast purposes of God--all was not
quite well with Brockhurst. At a given moment of time, the diabolic
element had of necessity obtruded itself. And, in the chronicles of
this delightful dwelling-place, even as in those of Eden itself, the
angels are proven not to have had things altogether their own gracious
way.

The pierced stone parapet, which runs round three sides of the house,
and constitutes, architecturally, one of its most noteworthy features,
is broken in the centre of the north front by a tall, stepped and
sharply pointed gable, flanked on either hand by slender, four-sided
pinnacles. From the niche in the said gable, arrayed in sugar-loaf hat,
full doublet and trunk hose, his head a trifle bent so that the tip of
his pointed beard rests on the pleatings of his marble ruff, a
carpenter's rule in his ri