Just on the highest ridge of the great waste of Redmoor, which is interspersed with dangerous peat-bogs and morasses, and extends about ten miles every way, with scarcely a fence or a tree, stands Redmoor House, from time immemorial--which means from the reign of Edward III.--the home of the Mitford family. Stands high and dry, and looking warm and snug and comfortable, with its red-brick face and its quaint gables and queer little mullioned windows. It is a house the sight of which would put spirit into a man chilled and numbed with looking over the great morass, and would give some vestige of credibility to the fact, that the sluggiest little stream born in the middle of the moor, and winding round through the gardens of the house, from its desolate birthplace flows down--as can be traced from the windows--through a land of plenty, of park and meadow, of orchard and cornfield, by the old cathedral-city, to the southern shore. A grand old house, with a big dining-hall like St. George's Chapel at Windsor on a small scale, without the stalls, but with the knightly banners, and the old oak, and the stained glass, and the solemn air of antiquity; with a picture-gallery full of ancestors, beginning with Sir Gerard, temp. Henry VIII., painted by Holbein, a jolly red-bearded swashbuckler, not unlike _his_ royal master, and ending with the late lamented Sir Percy, painted by Lawrence, with a curly head of hair, a fur collar to his coat, a smile of surprising sweetness, and altogether not unlike _his_ royal master. There were drawing-rooms in blue and amber; a charming bow-windowed room hung with tapestry, and commanding a splendid view over the cultivated landscape, which, in the housekeeper's tradition, had been a boudoir for Sir Percy's lady, who died within three years of her marriage; a grand old library, the bookcases in black oak, and nearly all the books in Russia leather, save those bought under the auspices of the late baronet,--Hansard's Debates, and a legal and magisterial set of volumes all bound in calf and red-lettered at the back. There is a grand terrace in front of the house, and all kinds of gardens stretch round it: Dutch gardens, formal, quaint, and solemn, with a touch of old-world stiffness like the Mynheers; Italian gardens, bright and sunny and gaudy, very glittering and effective, but not very satisfactory after all, like the Signori; English gardens, with ample space of glorious close-shaved lawn, and such wealth of roses as to keep the whole air heavy with their fragrance. Great prolific kitchen-gardens at the back, and stables and coach-houses which might be better; but the late baronet cared for nothing but his quarter-sessions and his yacht; and so long as he had a pair of horses to jolt with him to join the judge's procession at assize-times, troubled himself not one jot how the internal economy of the stables was ordered.