easy-going old Carolina towns that liked plenty of elbow-room and
wasn't particular about architectural order. Hynds House itself was
on the extreme edge of things.

The hack presently stopped before a high iron gate in a waist-high
brick wall with a spiked iron railing on top of it, the whole
overrun with weeds and creepers. Of Hynds House itself one couldn't
see anything but a stack of chimneys above a forest of trees.

The gate creaked and groaned on its rusty hinges; then we were
walking up a weedy, rain-soaked path where untrimmed branches
slapped viciously at our faces, and tough brambles, like snares and
gins, tried to catch our feet. On each side was a jungle. Of a
sudden the path turned, widened into a fairly cleared space; and
Hynds House was before us.

We had expected a fair-sized dwelling-house in its garden. And there
confronted us, glooming under the gray and threatening sky that
seemed the only proper and fitting canopy for it, what looked like a
pile reared in medieval Europe rather than a home in America. Its
stained brick walls, partly covered with ivy and lichens; its
smokeless chimneys; its barred doors; its many shuttered windows,
like blind eyes--all appeared deliberately to thrust aside human
habitancy.

_A residence for woman, child, and man,
A dwelling-place,--and yet no habitation;
A House,--but under some prodigious ban
Of Excommunication._