other homes of poesy that people of taste wish to live and die in.
Mustard and cress could have been raised on the inner plaster of the
dewy walls at any height not exceeding three feet from the floor;
and mushrooms of the most refined and thin-stemmed kinds grew up
through the chinks of the larder paving. As for the outside,
Nature, in the ample time that had been given her, had so mingled
her filings and effacements with the marks of human wear and tear
upon the house, that it was often hard to say in which of the two or
if in both, any particular obliteration had its origin. The
keenness was gone from the mouldings of the doorways, but whether
worn out by the rubbing past of innumerable people's shoulders, and
the moving of their heavy furniture, or by Time in a grander and
more abstract form, did not appear. The iron stanchions inside the
window-panes were eaten away to the size of wires at the bottom
where they entered the stone, the condensed breathings of
generations having settled there in pools and rusted them. The
panes themselves had either lost their shine altogether or become
iridescent as a peacock's tail. In the middle of the porch was a
vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind
blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say,
'Here's your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am an
old dial; and shiftiness is the best policy.'

Anne passed under the arched gateway which screened the main front;
over it was the porter's lodge, reached by a spiral staircase.
Across the archway was fixed a row of wooden hurdles, one of which
Anne opened and closed behind her. Their necessity was apparent as
soon as she got inside. The quadrangle of the ancient pile was a
bed of mud and manure, inhabited by calves, geese, ducks, and sow
pigs surprisingly large, with young ones surprisingly small. In the