A daughter of the old servant lived by
the gate, in what had been a porter's lodge, and was permitted to come
into the house about an hour each day, to make the beds, and cook a
morsel of provisions.
The park that surrounded the house was all run wild; the trees grown
out of shape; the fish-ponds stagnant; the urns and statues fallen from
their pedestals and buried among the rank grass. The hares and
pheasants were so little molested, except by poachers, that they bred
in great abundance, and sported about the rough lawns and weedy
avenues. To guard the premises and frighten off robbers, of whom he was
somewhat apprehensive, and visitors, whom he held in almost equal awe,
my uncle kept two or three blood-hounds, who were always prowling round
the house, and were the dread of the neighboring peasantry. They were
gaunt and half-starved, seemed ready to devour one from mere hunger,
and were an effectual check on any stranger's approach to this wizard
castle.
Such was my uncle's house, which I used to visit now and then during
The holydays. I was, as I have before said, the old man's favorite;
that is to say, he did not hate me so much as he did the rest of the
world. I had been apprised of his character, and cautioned to cultivate
his good-will; but I was too young and careless to be a courtier; and
indeed have never been sufficiently studious of my interests to let
them govern my feelings. However, we seemed to jog on very well
together; and as my visits cost him almost nothing, they did not seem
to be very unwelcome. I brought with me my gun and fishing-rod, and
half supplied the table from the park and the fishponds.
Our meals were solitary and unsocial. My uncle rarely spoke; he pointed
for whatever he wanted, and the servant perfectly understood him.
Indeed, his man John, or Iron John, as he was called in the
neighborhood, was a counterpart of his master. He was a tall, bony old
fellow, with a dry wig that seemed made of cow's tail, and a face as
tough as though it had been made of bull's hide. He was generally clad
in a long, patched livery coat, taken out of the wardrobe of the house;
and which bagged loosely about him, having evidently belonged to some
corpulent predecessor, in the more plenteous days of the mansion. From
long habits of taciturnity, the hinges of his jaws seemed to have grown
absolutely rusty, and it cost him as much effort to set them ajar, and
to let out a tolerable sentence, as it would have done to set open the
iron gates of a park, and let out the family carriage that was dropping
to pieces in the coach-house.
I cannot say, however, but that I was for some time amused with my
uncle's peculiarities. Even the very desolateness of the establishment
had something in it that hit my fancy. When the weather was fine I used
to amuse myself, in a solitary way, by rambling about the park, and
coursing like a colt across its lawns. The hares and pheasants seemed
to stare with surprise, to see a human being walking these forbidden
grounds by day-light. Sometimes I amused myself by jerking stones, or
shooting at birds with a bow and arrows; for to have used a gun would
have been treason. Now and then my path was crossed by a little
red-headed, ragged-tailed urchin, the son of the woman at the lodge,
who ran wild about the premises. I tried to draw him into familiarity,
and to make a companion of him; but he seemed to have imbibed the
strange, unsocial character of every thing around him; and always kept
aloof; so I considered him as another Orson, and amused myself with
shooting at him with my bow and arrows, and he would hold up his
breeches with one hand, and scamper away like a deer.
There was something in all this loneliness and wildness strangely
pleasing to me. The great stables, empty and weather-broken, with the
names of favorite horses over the vacant stalls; the windows bricked
and boarded up; the broken roofs, garrisoned by rooks and jackdaws; all
had a singularly forlorn appearance: one would have concluded the house
to be totally uninhabited, were it not for a little thread of blue
smoke, which now and then curled up like a corkscrew, from the centre
of one of the wide chimneys, when my uncle's starveling meal was
cooking.
My uncle's room was in a remote corner of the building, strongly
secured and generally locked. I was never admitted into this
strong-hold, where the old man would remain for the greater part of the
time, drawn up like a veteran spider in the citadel of his web. The
rest of the mansion, however, was open to me, and I sauntered about it
unconstrained. The damp and rain which beat in through the broken
windows, crumbled the paper from the walls; mouldered the pictures, and
gradually destroyed the furniture. I loved to rove about the wide,
waste chambers in bad weather, and listen to the howling of the wind,
and the banging about of the doors and window-shutters. I pleased
myself with the idea how completely, when I came to the estate, I would
renovate all things, and make the old building ring with merriment,
till it was astonished at its own jocundity.
The chamber which I occupied on these visits was the same that had been
my mother's, when a girl. There was still the toilet-table of her own
adorning; the landscapes of her own drawing. She had never seen it
since her marriage, but would often ask me if every thing was still the
same. All was just the same; for I loved that chamber on her account,
and had taken pains to put every thing in order, and to mend all the
flaws in the windows with my own hands.
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