in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped,
that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my
Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view and
a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the
foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall--drip,
drip, drip--upon the broad flagged pavement, called from old time
the Ghost's Walk, all night. On Sundays the little church in the
park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and
there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in
their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in
the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge and seeing
the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from
the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the
rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through
the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says
she has been "bored to death."

Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in
Lincolnshire and has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the
rabbits, and the deer, and the partridges and pheasants. The
pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed to vanish into
the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has
passed along the old rooms shutting up the shutters. And when they
will next come forth again, the fashionable intelligence--which,
like the fiend, is omniscient of the past and present, but not the
future--cannot yet undertake to say.

Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier
baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely
more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might