The house was an old three-sided, one-storied Saxon grange, enclosing a quadrangle. Its original form, however, was not easy of detection at a glance. Here and there, where the thatched roof had fallen in, some ambitious proprietor had run up a turret, apparently with no other design than that of “playing at castles.” In one place, a Gothic transept had been attempted, with a tolerably handsome mullioned window; but the hall, which the window had been intended to illuminate, not having been constructed, that ornament had been backed up with slanting thatch, and served only to enlighten the family cows, by whom its beauties were, doubtless, appreciated. Eccentric sheds, outhouses, and supplementary wings of all shapes and dimensions,--except the symmetrical or the grand,--clustered round the parent edifice like limpets on a stone. The whole was surrounded, at some distance, by a goodly moat (fed from the neighbouring trout stream), which had long been ceded as a perpetual seat of war between the ducks and tadpoles. The approach to the house was by a drawbridge, that had not been raised for many years, and was now incorporated with the common road, till such time as its rotten timbers should give way, and possibly precipitate a load of wheat or so into the ditch beneath. The bridge was backed by a small but well-built turreted gate of the early Norman school. In this there were the grooves for a portcullis. But if the iron grillage had ever been furnished, it had disappeared before the recollection of the oldest clodhopper. A low wooden gate had once supplied its place, but had lost its hinges, and lay halfburied in farm-yard refuse. The arched gateway, black with age and neglect, was surmounted by a dazzling, jaunty-looking freestone shield,--on which the arms of the family had been newly carved by no inartistic hand,--marvellously suggestive of a new patch on an old jerkin or a jewel in a swine’s ear. At some distance from the main building, and close inside the moat--for Geoffrey Falstaff’s magnificent architectural dreams had conceived the covering of almost the entire enclosure--stood the really splendid tower of William of Wykeham, which had given the name of Folly to the family mansion. This was a most imposing and picturesque object. Though barely twenty years had elapsed since its construction, it presented all the aspects of a venerable ruin. Being built of soft Norman stone, which rapidly crumbles and darkens in our climate; being roofless and windowless in the upper stories; having been utterly neglected and being overrun by ivy and other creeping plants, nourished by a scarcely credible waste of farm ordures heaped on the soil beneath, the tower looked like the last proud relic of some mighty fortress long since swept away by the ravages of war--the original building appearing like a heap of ignoble fabrics constructed from its ruins.