ant of water,
loaded with griffins and satyrs and mermaids with ample busts, all
overgrown with a green damp growth, which was scraped off by the
joint efforts of the gardener and mason once perhaps in every five
years.

It often seems that the beauty of architecture is accidental. A great
man goes to work with great means on a great pile, and makes a great
failure. The world perceives that grace and beauty have escaped him,
and that even magnificence has been hardly achieved. Then there grows
up beneath various unknown hands a complication of stones and brick
to the arrangement of which no great thought seems to have been
given; and, lo, there is a thing so perfect in its glory that he who
looks at it declares that nothing could be taken away and nothing
added without injury and sacrilege and disgrace. So it had been, or
rather so it was now, with the Hall at Humblethwaite. No rule ever
made for the guidance of an artist had been kept. The parts were out
of proportion. No two parts seemed to fit each other. Put it all on
paper, and it was an absurdity. The huge hall and porch added on by
the builder of Queen Anne's time, at the very extremity of the house,
were almost a monstrosity. The passages and staircases, and internal
arrangements, were simply ridiculous. But there was not a portion
of the whole interior that did not charm; nor was there a corner of
the exterior, nor a yard of an outside wall, that was not in itself
eminently beautiful.

Lord Alfred Gresley, as he was driven into the court in the early
dusk of a winter evening, having passed through a mile and a half
of such park scenery as only Cumberland and Westmoreland can show,
was fully alive to the glories of the place. Humblethwaite did not
lie among the lakes,--was, indeed, full ten miles to the north of
Keswick; but it was so placed that it enjoyed the beauty and the
luxury of mountains and rivers, without the roughness of unmanageable
rocks, or the sterility and dampness of moorland. Of rocky fragments,
indeed, peeping out through the close turf, and here and there coming
forth boldly so as to break the park into little depths, with now and
again a real ravine, there were plenty. And there ran right across
the park, passing so near the Hall as to require a stone bridge in
the very flower-garden, the Caldbeck, as bright and swift a stream
as ever took away the water from neighbouring mountains. And to the
south of Humblethwaite there stood the huge S