Mr Thorpe looked a little discomposed and changed, in fact, even since they last had seen him. Usually, though not pedantic, he was tedious; but he began for a moment to appear almost respectable in the very eyes of his pupil, who had often thought before that the present curate at Stoke could not be more monotonous, nor the old rector duller: a spark of spirit seemed for the time to have given emphasis to his words, and meaning to his face—some faint dignity to his lengthy awkward person, sitting ordinarily like a sack on his horse, with the gaiters dangling in the stirrups. Yet how amazingly simple was Mr Thorpe; it was chiefly the Italian with his battered instruments and beaten animals that seemed to have roused him from his wont: while as for his chief puzzle, a light broke on it to the boy at once, from all he had seen and heard of these French. Why,—of course they thought the whole world should know Charlemont already! But, to the ladies, softly plashed and clattered below, from among alders in the deeper hollow, the mill-wheel of the village, dusty light flying from the upper door: the cracked striking of a clock was heard from farther off, till they saw the grey turrets of another yellow chateau among trees, though but a thread of smoke rose from it, and its discoloured plaster, where the sunlight struck, gave it a dilapidated aspect, helped by the pigeons from the dovecote tower close by, that were sitting on the window-sills and eaves. Full to the light on the brow of the eminence rose the carriage, widening the landscape on every side, save where the woods before it extended: there was a smooth, broad road in front, sweeping round where the labourers were still at work on it: they were on a hill, and all was exquisitely solitary otherwise for the first time, except close by, where the highway ran between the two porter’s-lodges of two great gates that faced each other. These great gates were, indeed, gorgeously beautiful, being each double, with side-wickets, all of open ironwork, elaborately complex; gilt crowns surmounted the globes upon their massy pillars of stone, their upper rims were formed of fleur-delis, as if of lance-heads, richly gilded; while the blade-shaped leaves, damasked and lettered with mottoes, stretched throughout the whole, hither and thither, like guardian swords, from the uncouth grasp of grotesque naked monsters at the lower corners; everywhere were small puzzling circles of cipher, and in the midst the joined halves composed a grand shield-shaped device, burnished and resplendent on either hand, of the royal arms of France. The very radiance of the afternoon sun came dazzling towards it, and threw the other way on the cross road, into one park, a mottled shadow of fleur-de-lis; shapes of crowns, ciphers, and monsters, even vanished among the dust of the horses’ feet on the highway as they trotted past—strange traces from the days of Louis Quatorze. Still was all that