'Old Stow House stands,' says he, 'or rather stood, some four miles within the Cornish border, on the northern slope of the largest and loveliest of those coombes'--which he had just been describing in a memorable passage of a preceding chapter (the sixth) in 'Westward Ho!' 'Eighty years _after_ Sir Richard's time there arose a huge Palladian pile, bedizened with every monstrosity of bad taste, which was built, so the story runs, by Charles II. for Sir Richard's great-grandson, the heir of that famous Sir Bevil who defeated the Parliamentary troops at Stratton, and died soon after, fighting valiantly at Lansdowne over Bath. But like most other things which owed their existence to the Stuarts, it rose only to fall again. An old man who had seen, as a boy, the foundation of the new house laid, lived to see it pulled down again, and the very bricks and timber sold upon the spot; and since then the stables have become a farmhouse, the tennis-court a sheep-cote, the great quadrangle a rick-yard; and civilization, spreading wave on wave so fast elsewhere, has surged back from that lonely corner of the land--let us hope only for awhile.[13] 'But I am not writing of that great _new_ Stow House, of the past glories whereof quaint pictures still hang in the neighbouring houses; ... I have to deal with a simpler age, and a sterner generation; and with the _old_ house, which had stood there, in part at least, from grey and mythic ages ... a huge, rambling building, half-castle, half-dwelling-house.... On three sides, to the north, west and south, the lofty walls of the old ballium still stood, with their machicolated turrets, loopholes, and dark downward crannies for dropping stones and fire on the besiegers; ... but the southern court of the ballium had become a flower-garden, with quaint terraces, statues, knots of flowers, clipped yews and hollies, and all the pedantries of the topiarian art. And, towards the east, where the vista of the valley opened, the old walls were gone, and the frowning Norman keep, ruined in the wars of the Roses, had been replaced by the rich and stately architecture of the Tudors. Altogether, the house, like the time, was in a transitionary state, and represented faithfully enough the passage of the old middle age into the new life which had just burst into blossom throughout Europe, never, let us pray, to see its autumn or its winter.