BAD HUGH





CHAPTER I

SPRING BANK


A large, old-fashioned, weird-looking wooden building, with strangely
shaped bay windows and stranger gables projecting here and there from
the slanting roof, where the green moss clung in patches to the moldy
shingles, or formed a groundwork for the nests the swallows built year
after year beneath the decaying eaves. Long, winding piazzas, turning
sharp, sudden angles, and low, square porches, where the summer sunshine
held many a fantastic dance, and where the winter storm piled up its
drifts of snow, whistling merrily as it worked, and shaking the loosened
casement as it went whirling by. Huge trees of oak and maple, whose
topmost limbs had borne and cast the leaf for nearly a century of years,
tall evergreens, among whose boughs the autumn wind ploughed mournfully,
making sad music for those who cared to listen, and adding to the
loneliness which, during many years, had invested the old place. A wide
spreading grassy lawn, with the carriage road winding through it, over