river-god with his finger on his lip, seemed listening for the music of those waters which now scarcely stirred amid the tangled weeds that clustered at his feet. Passing all these, passing also the flower-beds choked with brambles and long waving grasses, and the once quaintly-clipped myrtle and box-trees, all flinging out fantastic arms of later growth, we came to the upper terrace, which was paved in curious patterns of stars and arabesques, with stones alternately round and flat. Here a good-humored, cleanly peasant woman came clattering out in her _sabots_ from a side-door, key in hand, preceded us up the double flight of steps, unlocked the great door, and admitted us. The interior, like the front, had been modernized about a hundred and fifty years before, and resembled a little formal Versailles or miniature Fontainebleau. Dismantled halls paved with white marble; panelled ante-chambers an inch deep in dust; dismal _salons_ adorned with Renaissance arabesques and huge looking-glasses, cracked and mildewed, and mended with pasted seams of blue paper; boudoirs with faded Watteau panellings; corridors with painted ceilings where mythological divinities, marvellously foreshortened on a sky-blue ground, were seen surrounded by rose-colored Cupids and garlanded with ribbons and flowers; innumerable bed-rooms, some containing grim catafalques of beds with gilded cornices and funereal plumes, some empty, some full of stored-up furniture fast going to decay--all these in endless number we traversed, conducted by the good-tempered _concierge_, whose heavy _sabots_ awakened ghostly echoes from floor to floor.