The Crock of Gold | Page 5

but, as the year wears on, those time-stained walls, though still both
damp and mouldy, will be luxuriantly overspread with creeping
plants--honeysuckle, woodbine, jessamine, and the everblowing
monthly rose. Many was the touring artist it had charmed, and
Suffolk-street had seen it often: spectators looked upon the scene as on
an old familiar friend, whose face they knew full well, but whose name
they had forgotten for the minute. Many were the fair hands that had
immortalized its beauties in their albums, and frequent the notes of
admiration uttered by attending swains: particularly if there chanced to
be taken into the view a feathery elm that now creaked overhead, and
dripped on the thatch like the dropping-well at Knaresborough, and (in
the near distance) a large pond, or rather lake, upon whose sedgy banks,
gay--not now, but soon about to be--with flowering reeds and bright
green willows, the pretty cottage stood. In truth, if man were but an
hibernating animal, invisible as dormice in the winter, and only to be
seen with summer swallows, Acton's cottage at Hurstley might have
been a cantle cut from the Elysian-fields. But there are certain other
seasons in the year, and human nature cannot long exist on the merely
"picturesque in summer."
Some fifty yards, or so, from the hither shore, we discern a roughly
wooded ait, Pike Island to wit, a famous place for fish, and the grand
rendezvous for woodcocks; which, among other useful and ornamental
purposes, serves to screen out the labourer's hovel, at this the narrowest
part of the lake, from a view of that fine old mansion on the opposite
shore, the seat of Sir John Vincent, a baronet just of age, and the great
landlord of the neighbourhood. Toward this mansion, scarcely yet
revealed in the clear gray eye of morning, our humble hero, having
made the long round of the lake, is now fast trudging; and it may merit
a word or two of plain description, to fill up time and scene, till he gets
nearer.
A smooth grassy eminence, richly studded with park-like clumps of
trees, slopes up from the water's very edge to--Hurstley Hall; yonder
goodly, if not grand, Elizabethan structure, full of mullioned windows,
carved oak panels, stone-cut coats of arms, pinnacles, and traceries, and

lozenges, and drops; and all this glory crowned by a many-gabled,
high-peaked roof. A grove of evergreens and American shrubs hides
the lower windows from vulgarian gaze--for, in the neighbourly feeling
of our ancestors, a public way leads close along the front; while, behind
the house, and inaccessible to eyes profane, are drawn terraced gardens,
beautifully kept, and blooming with a perpetual succession of the
choicest flowers. The woods and shrubberies around, attempted some
half a century back to be spoilt by the meddlesome bad taste of
Capability Brown, have been somewhat too resolutely robbed of the
formal avenues, clipped hedges, and other topiarian adjuncts which
comport so well with the starch prudery of things Elizabethan; but they
are still replete with grotto, fountain, labyrinth, and alcove--a very
paradise for the more court-bred rank of sylphs, and the gentler elves of
Queen Titania.
However, we have less to do with the gardens than, probably, the elves
have; and as Roger now, just at breaking day, is approaching the
windows somewhat too curiously for a poor man's manners, it may not
be amiss if we bear him company. He had pretty well recovered of his
fit of discontent, for morning air and exercise can soon chase gloom
away; so he cheerily tramped along, thinking as he went, how that, after
all, it is a middling happy world, and how that the raindrops, now that it
had cleared up, hung like diamonds on the laurels, when of a sudden, as
he turned a corner near the house, there broke upon his ear, at that quiet
hour, such a storm of boisterous sounds--voices so loud with oaths and
altercation--such a calling, clattering, and quarrelling, as he had never
heard the like before. So no wonder that he stepped aside to see it.
The noise proceeded from a ground-floor window, or rather from three
windows, lighted up, and hung with draperies of crimson and gold: one
of the casements, flaring meretriciously in the modest eye of morn,
stood wide open down to the floor, probably to cool a heated
atmosphere; and when Roger Acton, with a natural curiosity, went on
tiptoe, looked in, and just put aside the curtain for a peep, to know what
on earth could be the matter, he saw a vision of waste and wealth, at
which he stood like one amazed, for a poor man's mind could never
have conceived its equal.

Evidently, he had intruded on the latter end of a long and luxurious
revel. Wax-lights, guttering down in