to pump him; the old landlord of the "Three Nuns,"
for some reason, did not choose to tell tales of Barwyke Hall, if he
really did, as I suspected, remember them.

I paid my reckoning, and resumed my journey, well pleased with the
good cheer of that old-world inn, but a little disappointed.

We had been driving for more than an hour, when we began to cross a
wild common; and I knew that, this passed, a quarter of an hour would
bring me to the door of Barwyke Hall.

The peat and furze were pretty soon left behind; we were again in the
wooded scenery that I enjoyed so much, so entirely natural and pretty,
and so little disturbed by traffic of any kind. I was looking from the
chaise-window, and soon detected the object of which, for some time,
my eye had been in search. Barwyke Hall was a large, quaint house, of
that cage-work fashion known as "black-and-white," in which the bars
and angles of an oak framework contrast, black as ebony, with the
white plaster that overspreads the masonry built into its interstices.
This steep-roofed Elizabethan house stood in the midst of park-like
grounds of no great extent, but rendered imposing by the noble stature
of the old trees that now cast their lengthening shadows eastward over
the sward, from the declining sun.

The park-wall was grey with age, and in many places laden with ivy. In
deep grey shadow, that contrasted with the dim fires of evening
reflected on the foliage above it, in a gentle hollow, stretched a
lake that looked cold and black, and seemed, as it were, to skulk from
observation with a guilty knowledge.

I had forgot that there was a lake at Barwyke; but the moment this
caught my eye, like the cold polish of a snake in the shadow, my
instinct seemed to recognize something dangerous, and I knew that the
lake was connected, I could not remember how, with the story I had
heard of this place in my boyhood.

I drove up a grass-grown avenue, under the boughs of these noble
trees, whose foliage, dyed in autumnal red and yellow, returned the
beams of the western sun gorgeously.

We drew up at the door. I got out, and had a good look at the front of
the house; it was a large and melancholy mansion, with signs of long
neglect upon it; great wooden shutters, in the old fashion, were
barred, outside, across the windows; grass, and even nettles, were
growing thick on the courtyard, and a thin moss streaked the timber
beams; the plaster was discoloured by time and weather