The gray walls and red-tiled roof of the bailiff’s house appeared between two masses of foliage as he drew near the border of the park. It was a house with many gables and great stacks of rickety-looking chimneys. Such a house as inspires contempt in the mind of a practical modern architect, by reason of the space that is frittered away on unnecessary passages, and little bits of rooms too small and dark for any civilized inhabitant, and ghastly cupboards in unsuspected places. It was a house in whose ample cellarage a gang of burglars might have lain perdu for a week, without the family being made aware of their presence. It was a house in which one could hardly retire to rest without expecting to see a pair of appalling Eyes staring at one through a crevice in the panelling, or two dreadful Boots emerging from beneath the drapery of the bed. If furniture of the commonest fashion, and fresh from the upholsterer, takes to itself awful voices after midnight, and creaks and groans with dismal significance in a modern London habitation, as it will--witness universal experience--what might not be expected from old oak bureaus and Elizabethan arm-chairs in this gabled dwelling? The out-buildings and disused chambers had that damp, earthy odour, which is known to every imaginative mind as the smell of ghosts; and that ubiquitous and nameless suicide, who seems to have hung himself or cut his throat at some remote date in every old house, had hung himself here, and made himself obnoxious to simple Berkshire maid-servants by those Cock-lane-like scrapings and tappings and rushings which the sternly commonplace mind is apt to attribute to rats. This was the place to which Eustace Thorburn came in the rosy summer evening to begin his new life. The garden, which he entered by a low wooden gate, was the growth of a hundred and fifty years, and was as securely walled in by thick and high hedges of holly and yew as it could have been by the work of any mortal builder. The air was odorous with the perfume of bright English flowers; and as the stranger drew near the house he was greeted with such a burst of honest woodland music from the throats of blackbirds and thrushes, larks and linnets, as he never remembered to have heard in all his life before. They were caged birds that sang so blithely, and their cages hung in the roomy wooden porch with a thatched roof, over which there was spread a curtain of flowering clematis and rich crimson-veined honeysuckle. Out of this dusky porch a great Newfoundland dog sprang at the intruder, awakening distant echoes by his deep-toned thunder. But a woman’s voice, very sweet and melodious, as the young man thought, called from the cottage, “Down, Hephæstus!--quiet, boy; quiet!” Eustace wondered what kind of woman this could be who lived in the student’s cottage, and called her dog Hephæstus.