But if it is fair now, and lovely, what was it as it showed in the good old days of King Charles, before the iron hand of civil war had pressed so heavily on England? The grove of sycamores stood there, as they stand now, in the prime and luxuriance of their sylvan manhood; for they are waxing now aged and somewhat gray and stag-horned; and the thorn bushes sheltered, as they do now, whole choirs of thrushes and blackbirds, but all the turf beneath the scattered trees and on the sunny slope was shorn, and rolled, and watered, that it was smooth and even, and far softer than the most costly carpet that ever wooed the step of Persian beauty. The Hall was a square building, not very large, of the old Elizabethan style, with two irregular additions, wings, as they might be called, of the same architecture, though of a later period, and its deep-embayed oriel windows, with their fantastic mullions of carved freestone, its tall quaint chimneys, and its low porch, with overhanging canopy and clustered columns, rendered it an object singularly picturesque and striking. The little green within the gorge of the upper glen, which is so wildly beautiful in its present situation, left as it is to the unaided hand of nature, was then a perfect paradise; for an exquisite taste had superintended its conversion into a sort of untrained garden; an eye well used to note effects had marked its natural capabilities, and, adding artificial beauties, had never trenched upon the character of the spot by anything incongruous or startling. Rare plants, rich-flowering shrubs, and scented herbs were indeed scattered with a lavish hand about its precincts, but were so scattered that they seemed the genuine productions of the soil; the Spanish cistus had been taught to carpet the wild crags in conjunction with the native thyme and heather; the arbutus and laurestinus had been brought from afar to vie with the mountain ash and holly; the clematis and the sweet scented vine blended their tendrils with the rich English honeysuckle and the luxuriant ivy; rare lotuses might be seen floating with their azure colored cups and broad green leaves upon the glassy basins, into which the mountain streamlet had been taught to expand, among the white wild water lilies and the bright yellow clusters of the marsh marigold; roses of every hue and scent, from the dark crimson of Damascus to the pale blush of soft Provence, grew side by side with the wild wood-brier and the eglantine, and many a rustic seat, of mossy stone or roots and unbarked branches, invited the loitering visiter in every shadowy angle.