good uns;" and the driver whipped on his own horse, took to whistling,
and Lionel asked no more.

At length the chaise stopped at a carriage gate, receding from the road,
and deeply shadowed by venerable trees,--no lodge. The driver,
dismounting, opened the gate.

"Is this the place?"

The driver nodded assent, remounted, and drove on rapidly through what
night by courtesy he called a park. The enclosure was indeed little
beyond that of a good-sized paddock; its boundaries were visible on every
side: but swelling uplands covered with massy foliage sloped down to its
wild, irregular turf soil,--soil poor for pasturage, but pleasant to the
eye; with dell and dingle, bosks of fantastic pollards; dotted oaks of
vast growth; here and there a weird hollow thorn-tree; patches of fern
and gorse. Hoarse and loud cawed the rooks; and deep, deep as from the
innermost core of the lovely woodlands came the mellow note of the
cuckoo. A few moments more a wind of the road brought the house in
sight. At its rear lay a piece of water, scarcely large enough to be
styled a lake; too winding in its shaggy banks, its ends too concealed by
tree and islet, to be called by the dull name of pond. Such as it was it
arrested the eye before the gaze turned towards the house: it had an air
of tranquillity so sequestered, so solemn. A lively man of the world
would have been seized with spleen at the first glimpse of it; but he who
had known some great grief, some anxious care, would have drunk the calm
into his weary soul like an anodyne. The house,--small, low, ancient,
about the date of Edward VI., before the statelier architecture of
Elizabeth. Few houses in England so old, indeed, as Fawley Manor House.
A vast weight of roof, with high gables; windows on the upper story