he foot of
the upper wall is almost hidden by the trees that grow on the top of the
lower, upon which it lies. The view of the river widens out before you
at every step as you climb to the house.

At the end you come to a second gateway, a Gothic archway covered
with simple ornament, now crumbling into ruin and overgrown with
wildflowers--moss and ivy, wallflowers and pellitory. Every stone wall
on the hillside is decked with this ineradicable plant-life, which
springs up along the cracks afresh with new wreaths for every time of
year.

The worm-eaten gate gives into a little garden, a strip of turf, a few
trees, and a wilderness of flowers and rose bushes--a garden won from
the rock on the highest terrace of all, with the dark, old balustrade
along its edge. Opposite the gateway, a wooden summer-house stands
against the neighboring wall, the posts are covered with jessamine and
honeysuckle, vines and clematis.

The house itself stands in the middle of this highest garden, above a
vine-covered flight of steps, with an arched doorway beneath that
leads to vast cellars hollowed out in the rock. All about the dwelling
trellised vines and pomegranate-trees (the _grenadiers_, which give the
name to the little close) are growing out in the open air. The front
of the house consists of two large windows on either side of a very
rustic-looking house door, and three dormer windows in the roof--a slate
roof with two gables, prodigiously high-pitched in proportion to the low
ground-floor. The house walls are washed with yellow color; and door,
and first-floor shutters, all the Venetian shutters of the attic
windows, all are painted green.

Entering the house, you find yourself in a little lobby with a crooked
staircase straight in front of you. It is a crazy wooden structure, the
spiral balusters are brown with age, and the steps themselves take a
new angle at every turn. The great old-fashioned paneled dining-room,
floored with square white tiles from Chateau-Regnault, is on your right;
to the left is the sitting-room, equally large, but here the walls
are not paneled; they have been covered instead with a saffron-colored
paper, bordered with green. The walnut-wood rafters are left visible,
and the intervening spaces filled with a kind of white plaster.

The first story consists of two large whitewashed bedrooms with stone
chimney-pieces, less elaborately carved than those in the rooms beneath.
Every door and window is on th