As for the moat, it was a checker of black and green, with moor-hens swimming on it and water-rats making rippling tracks from wall to wall, while here and there great rambling roses, that had not felt the knife for many a year, poured over the brick parapet, and hung in summer-like banners of green flowered with crimson and gold. The crown of the bridge had been broken, and several tree-trunks, ranged side to side and banked with earth and brushwood, filled up the gap. The court-yard gate, a new one since Waller’s day, seemed the only unruined thing about the place; but the court-yard itself was knee-deep with grass and weeds at hay-time. In the garden there were stretches of turf that had once been lawns, paths that were no longer visible, roses and shrubs growing as they listed, for a corner of the vegetable-garden alone had been kept in cultivation. The out-houses and stables in the kitchen court were crumbling and falling in—a quaint medley of ragged thatch and gaunt roof timber, falling plaster, and lichened brick. Yet the old thorns that grew in the grass-land beyond the moat, thorn-trees that had given the house a name and were outliving it, stretched out their flat tops like so many pleading and appealing hands. They were white each spring above the green rushes, the brown mole-heaps, and the dew-wet grass. And in the winter the birds flocked to them and fed upon the red berries, welcome, indeed, when the turf was frost-bound or when the snow lay deep. So the old thorns lived on as they had lived for generations, while “Thorn” crumbled brick by brick, and the ivy, as though yearning to hide its nakedness, made it dim with glimmering green. Thorn had its ghost, and no Sussex churl would come within half a mile of it when dusk began to fall. An old Scotch gardener and his wife had lived there some ten years, warm and snug in the rain-proof kitchen, daring the devil and all spirits and insects with a handful of good sulphur. MacAlister and his dame had been given their quittance that autumn, and had been packed off into some distant county, no man knew why or where, and no man cared. The owls might fledge their broods, the jackdaws build in the chimneys, and the place be given up to all manner of mystery and ghostliness. None had troubled in those parts about Thorn, save one farmer who had needed a new barn, and had driven a wagon over to thieve bricks, and come away with such a scaring that every one believed him when he swore the place was cursed.