every tree and flower, on the still ponds and quiet alleys, the shady
corners of the old-fashioned rooms, the deep window-seats behind the
painted glass, the low meadows and the stately avenues--ay, even upon
the stagnant well, which, cool and sheltered as all else in the old
place, hid itself away in a shrubbery behind the gardens, with an idle
handle that was never turned and a lazy rope so rotten that the pail had
broken away from it, and had fallen into the water.

A noble place; inside as well as out, a noble place--a house in which
you incontinently lost yourself if ever you were so rash as to attempt
to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no one room had any
sympathy with another, every chamber running off at a tangent into an
inner chamber, and through that down some narrow staircase leading to a
door which, in its turn, led back into that very part of the house from
which you thought yourself the furthest; a house that could never have
been planned by any mortal architect, but must have been the handiwork
of that good old builder, Time, who, adding a room one year, and
knocking down a room another year, toppling down a chimney coeval with
the Plantagenets, and setting up one in the style of the Tudors; shaking
down a bit of Saxon wall, allowing a Norman arch to stand here; throwing
in a row of high narrow windows in the reign of Queen Anne, and joining
on a dining-room after the fashion of the time of Hanoverian George I,
to a refectory that had been standing since the Conquest, had contrived,
in some eleven centuries, to run up such a mansion as was not elsewhere
to be met with throughout the county of Essex. Of course, in such a
house there were secret chambers; the little daughter of the present
owner, Sir Michael Audley, had fallen by accident upon the discovery of
one. A board had rattled under her feet in the great nursery where she
played, and on attention being drawn to it, it was found to be loose,
and so removed, revealed a ladder, leading to a hiding-place between the