great gratification was to bear away with them the prizes from the Horticultural Shows in the neighbourhood. Beyond the orchard was a large field, known as the Paddock, whither thee croquet-players and the archers were relegated, and where the turf was almost as smooth as that of the sacred lawn itself. Over all,--house, lawn, orchard, kitchen-garden, and paddock, and far away across the surrounding downs--there was a delicious sense of calm and quiet; a feeling which was heightened rather than lessened by the inhabitants of a rookery established in the tall elm-trees bordering the Paddock, and who, as they sailed over the grounds of the Grange, would express their approbation by one single solemn caw. The house faced the avenue, and was a queer, odd, square block, by no means picturesque, but quaintly ugly something like an old-fashioned child, whose decidedly curious features, out of all drawing and impossible to be admired, yet have something humorously lovable in their expression. A staring red-brick house of Queen Anne's time, that ought to have been formal, and perhaps had been at some period or other, but which had undergone so many changes--had had so many gables put on here, and windows let in there, and rooms added on wherever they were wanted--as to lose all trace of its original design, and to have become of a composite style of architecture which would have driven Mr. Ruskin mad. It was the only gentleman's seat for miles round which was built of red brick, and not that gray stone which always looks weather-beaten and time-worn; instead of which, the Grange had a jolly, cheery, comic expression, and when the sun gleamed on its little diamond-shaped, leaden-casemented windows, they seemed to twinkle like the eyes of a genial red-faced old gentleman at some good joke or pleasant dish. A comfortable old house in every sense of the word, with an enormous number of rooms, large airy spacious chambers, queer little nooks and snuggeries, long passages with pannelled partitions dividing them from other passages, partitions with occasional square windows or round eyelet-holes cut in them, wide straggling staircases with broad steps and broad balustrades, which no boy had ever yet been known to pass without sliding down them on his stomach. A couple of queer turreted chambers, like the place where the yard-measure lives in old-fashioned work-boxes, and a set of attics, low-roofed, and rather worm-eaten and mouldy-smelling. These were not inhabited, for the servants had their own quarters in the western wing; a bit of eccentric building, which had been thrown out long after the original structure, and gave to the old mansion, from the back view, a comical lopsided appearance; and when the rest of the house was filled, the bachelors were sent to what was known as the Barracks, or the Kennel, a series of jolly little rooms shut out from the respectable portion of the building by a long passage, where they