Passing gardens as full of nettles as of pot-herbs, and entering between a couple of gate-posts, each crowned by the image of a rampant bear, the young soldier at last saw before him, at the end of an avenue, the steep roofs and crow-stepped gable ends of Bradwardine, half dwelling-house, half castle. Here Waverley dismounted, and, giving his horse to the soldier-servant who had accompanied him, he entered a court in which no sound was to be heard save the plashing of a fountain. He saw the door of a tall old mansion before him. Going up he raised the knocker, and instantly the echoes resounded through the empty house. But no one came to answer. The castle appeared uninhabited, the court a desert. Edward glanced about him, half expecting to be hailed by some ogre or giant, as adventurers used to be in the fairy tales he had read in childhood. But instead he only saw all sorts of bears, big and little, climbing (as it seemed) on the roof, over the windows, and out upon the ends of the gables--while over the door at which he had been vainly knocking he read in antique lettering the motto, "BEWAR THE BAR." But all these bruins were of stone, and each one of them kept as still and silent as did everything else about this strange mansion--except, that is, the fountain, which, behind him in the court, kept up its noisy splashing. Feeling, somehow, vaguely uncomfortable, Edward Waverley crossed the court into a garden, green and pleasant, but to the full as solitary as the castle court. Here again he found more bears, all sitting up in rows on their haunches, on parapets and along terraces, as if engaged in looking at the view. He wandered up and down, searching for some one to whom to speak, and had almost made up his mind that he had found a real enchanted Castle of Silence, when in the distance he saw a figure approaching up one of the green walks. There was something uncouth and strange about the way the newcomer kept waving his hands over his head--then, for no apparent reason, flapping them across his breast like a groom on a frosty day, hopping all the time first on one foot and then on the other. Tiring of this way of getting over the ground, he would advance by standing leaps, keeping both feet together. The only thing he seemed quite incapable of doing was to use his feet, one after the other, as ordinary people do when they are walking. Indeed, this strange guardian of the enchanted castle of Bradwardine looked like a gnome or fairy dwarf. For he was clad in an old-fashioned dress of grey, slashed with scarlet. On his legs were scarlet stockings and on his head a scarlet cap, which in its turn was surmounted by a turkey's feather.