Their watchful
eyes beneath the fern may be shining now, if we could see them, like
the icy dewdrops on the leaves; but they are still, and all is
still. And so, the lights growing larger, and the trees falling
back before us, and closing up again behind us, as if to forbid
retreat, we come to the house.
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good
comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories--
Ghost Stories, or more shame for us--round the Christmas fire; and
we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it. But,
no matter for that. We came to the house, and it is an old house,
full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the
hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too)
lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls. We are a
middle-aged nobleman, and we make a generous supper with our host
and hostess and their guests--it being Christmas-time, and the old
house full of company--and then we go to bed. Our room is a very
old room. It is hung with tapestry. We don't like the portrait of
a cavalier in green, over the fireplace. There are great black
beams in the ceiling, and there is a great black bedstead, supported
at the foot by two great black figures, who seem to have come off a
couple of tombs in the old baronial church in the park, for our
particular accommodation.
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