ries-old ivy, and gables and finials
outlined against the sky; and it was only at the rear, where were our
dank court-yard, our wheezing pump, a dark vista into our dirty kitchen,
and where often were strident Miss Betsy and Miss Sally, that we looked
our deserving the name "Dothegirls Hall."

It was in lovely Warwickshire, where green meadows sweep to the gentle
Avon, which glides only a few miles away through Stratford and past
Shakespeare's home. Many of our countrypeople drove past the stately
front of our Priory every day, visiting, as all good Americans do,
Kenilworth Castle, with Amy Robsart's story in their hands, and
Coventry, with Lady Godiva on their tongues and silk book-markers on
their minds.

Our brother and sister Yankees always gazed with admiration, not
unmingled with awe, upon our Priory, and gushed over it to each other.
For not only is it one of the most picturesque objects of a famously
picturesque Elizabethan town, but it has an added interest to Americans
in having been mentioned in Hawthorne's "Our Old Home."

Our countrypeople gazed upon us with admiration, little dreaming the
dark secrets we had discovered concerning that impressive pile, whose
peaked roofs and soaring gables sheltered monk and prior before yet our
own country had a name, and in whose cavernous cellars only the bravest
of the servants dared to go, lest gowned and hooded spectres should ask
what her business was.

Of course to profane and worldly eyes these ghosts assumed the mean
guise of empty boxes, decaying barrels and timbers, old kitchen-refuse,
and such-like ghostly fowl. But there were spirits in mortal form among
us imaginative enough to penetrate this sordid masquerade and to know
that subterraneanly we were haunted by goblins damned, if ever a priory
was since goblins and priories were invented. Our servants could not
disbelieve in our delightful ghosts, we _would_ not: hence we found our
Priory as stimulative to the historic, poetic, and supernatural
imagination as it was shocking to our moral sense and inflammatory to
our tempers.

But these last two effects resulted from a _rear_ knowledge of St.
John's; our _front_ view was always worthy of picture and poem, having
wide portals, over which was the date of their last repair in 1622,
humped Tudor gables, and mullioned windows set with diamond panes.

St. John's belongs to a noble earl, whose castle overhangs the Avon only
a stone's throw away. As is so often