oats to his christening! Matters have mended since,
laus Deo--laus Deo, indeed! for I suspect neither Miles nor his father
would ever have been able to do much for themselves, and by their own
wits.

Castlewood House has quite a different face now from that venerable
one which it wore in the days of my youth, when it was covered with the
wrinkles of time, the scars of old wars, the cracks and blemishes which
years had marked on its hoary features. I love best to remember it in
its old shape, as I saw it when young Mr. George Warrington went down
at the owner's invitation, to be present at his lordship's marriage with
Miss Lydia Van den Bosch--"an American lady of noble family of Holland,"
as the county paper announced her ladyship to be. Then the towers stood
as Warrington's grandfather the Colonel (the Marquis, as Madam Esmond
would like to call her father) had seen them. The woods (thinned not
a little to be sure) stood, nay, some of the self-same rooks may have
cawed over them, which the Colonel had seen threescore years back. His
picture hung in the hall which might have been his, had he not preferred
love and gratitude to wealth and worldly honour; and Mr. George Esmond
Warrington (that is, Egomet Ipse who write this page down), as he
walked the old place, pacing the long corridors, the smooth dew-spangled
terraces and cool darkling avenues, felt a while as if he was one of Mr.
Walpole's cavaliers with ruff, rapier, buff-coat, and gorget, and as if
an Old Pretender, or a Jesuit emissary in disguise, might appear from
behind any tall tree-trunk round about the mansion, or antique carved
cupboard within it. I had the strangest, saddest, pleasantest, old-world
fancies as I walked the place; I imagined tragedies, intrigues,
serenades, escaladoes, Oliver's Roundheads battering the towers, or
bluff Hal's Beefeaters pricking over the plain before the castle. I was
then courting a certain young lady (madam, your ladyship's eyes had no
need of spectacles then, and on the brow above them there was never a
wrinkle or a silver hair), and I remember I wrote a ream of romantic
description, under my Lord Castlewood's franks, to the lady who never
tired of reading my letters then. She says I only send her three lines
now, when I am away in London or elsewhere. 'Tis that I may not fatigue
your old eyes, my dear!

Mr. Warrington thought himself authorised to order a genteel new suit of
clothes for my lord's marriage, and with Mons.