are a traveller from a land where there are no Early-English--and indeed
few Late-English--arches, and where the well-covers are, at their hoariest,
of fresh-looking shingles, you grow used with little delay to all this
antiquity. Anything very old seems extremely natural: there is nothing we
accept so implicitly as the past. It is not too much to say that after
spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six hundred years old, you
seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years. You seem yourself
to have hollowed the flags with your tread and to have polished the oak
with your touch. You walk along the little stone gallery where the monks
used to pace, looking out of the Gothic window-places at their beautiful
church, and you pause at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to
what is now the drawing-room. The massive step by which you ascend to the
threshold is a trifle crooked, as it should be: the lintels are cracked and
worn by the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual glance. You
look up and down the miniature cloister before you pass in: it seems
wonderfully old and queer. Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you
find modern conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner.
The new life and the old have melted together: there is no dividing-line.
In the drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end
inward, like a small casemate. You ask a lady what it is, but she doesn't
know. It is something of the monks: it is a mere detail. After dinner you
are told that there is of course a ghost--a gray friar who is seen in the
dusky hours at the end of passages. Sometimes the servants see him, and
afterward go surreptitiously to sleep in the town. Then, when you take your
chamber-candle and go wandering bedward by a short cut through empty rooms,
you are conscious of a peculiar sensation which you hardly know whether to
interpret as a desire to see the gray friar or as an apprehension that you
will see him.

A friend of mine, an American, who knew this country, had told me not to