“I don’t call that manners,” muttered Mr. Penruffin; “but I shall cook the chicken for ten o’clock, and chance it; he can afford to pay for it, whether he eats it or not. And I think, taking into consideration old acquaintance and thirty thousand a year, it would only have been friendly in Francis Tredethlyn if he’d ordered a bottle of wine with his dinner.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VI. THE END OF THE WORLD. The sun was low when Francis Tredethlyn left the Crown Inn, and walked slowly up the village street. The sun was low, and already a crimson glory flickered here and there upon the quaint old casements. The young man walked slowly, looking about him with a half-doubtful, half-bewildered gaze, like a man who sees his native village in a dream. And indeed no village in the vision of a sleeper could be more tranquil in its rustic repose than this Cornish street, steep and stony, mounting to the summit of a hill, upon whose top the great gates of Landresdale loomed grim and stately, like the entrance to an ogre’s castle in fairyland. You climbed the steep little street; and you came to the big gates of Landresdale; and that was all. The village ended here; and there was nothing for you to do but to go back again. It was like coming to the end of the world, and finding a great Elizabethan door of ponderous oak and iron barred against any chaotic realm that might lie beyond our every-day earth. There may have been occasions--indeed, the inhabitants of Landresdale would have testified to many such--on which those ponderous doors swung open on their mighty hinges: but the ignorant traveller, looking at them shut, found it difficult to realize the possibility of their ever being opened. They looked like the doors of a mausoleum: which may open once in half a century to admit the coffined dead, but can never be unclosed for any meaner purpose. Grim towers flanked the stony arch on either side, and two old rusty cannon displayed their iron noses within the shadow of the towers, ready to fire a volley down the hilly street whenever the simple folks of Landresdale should evince any revolutionary tendencies. To the right of the great gates there was a handsome wing of solid masonry, whose Tudor windows opened upon a square courtyard, where there were more cannon, and upon a prim, old-fashioned garden, shut in by a high wall, and only visible to the wanderer through the iron rails and arabesques of a lofty gate, amidst whose scrollwork the arms of the Landresdales and Treverbyns, the Courtenays and Polwheles, were interlaced and entangled.