f its steep ascent had an air of sedate prosperity that
did not reflect the reality of a slow depopulation.

About half-way up the hill on the other side of the town from Plashers
Mead and the Rectory was a side-street called Abbey Lane that, instead
of leading to open country, was bounded by a high stone wall. This
blocked the thoroughfare except so far as to allow a narrow path to
skirt its base and give egress along some untidy cottage gardens to a
cross-road farther up the hill.

In the middle of the wall confronting the street two columns surmounted
with huge round finials showed where there had once been a gate wide
enough to admit a coach. Above the wall a belt of high trees obscured
the view and gave a dank shadow to the road beneath. At one corner a
small wooden wicket with a half-obliterated proclamation of privacy
enabled any one to pass through the wall and enter the grounds of
Wychford Abbey. This wicket opened directly on a path that wound through
a plantation of yews interspersed with tall beeches and elms, whose
overarching tops intensified even in Wintry leaflessness the prevalent
gloom. The silence of this plantation made Wychford High Street seem in
remembrance a noisy, cheerful place, and the mere crackling of twigs and
beech-mast induced the visitor to walk more quietly, fearful of
profaning the mysteriousness even by so slight an indication of human
presence. The plantation continued in tiers of trees down the hill to
the Greenrush, which had been deepened by a dam to support this gloom of
overhanging branches with slow and solemn stream. The path, however,
kept to the level ground and emerged presently upon a large square of
pallescent grass the farther side of which was bounded by a deserted
house.

There were no ruins of the ecclesiastical foundation to fret a Gothic
moonlight, but Wychford Abbey did not require these to justify the
foreboding approach; and the great Jacobean pile, whose stones the
encroaching trees had robbed of warmth and vitality, brooded in the
silence with a monstrous ghostliness that was scarcely heightened by the
signs of material decay. Nevertheless, the casements whose glass was
filmy like the eyes of blind men or sometimes diced with sinister gaps;
the cracks and fissures in the external fabric; the headless supporters
of the family coat; and the roof slowly being torn tile from tile by
ivy--did consummate the initial impression. Within, the desolation was
more mark