It was a gloomy old edifice: the bricks had become discolored; the livery of age, yellow and gray lichen, was upon it; daws hovered round the chimney tops; rooks passed cawing over it, on the way to their conventicle hard by; no swallow built under the eaves; and the trees, as if repelled by its stern, cold aspect, retreated from it on three sides, leaving it alone on its own flat ground, like a moody man amidst a gay society. On the fourth side, indeed, an avenue--that is to say, two rows of old elms--crept cautiously up to it in a winding and sinuous course, as if afraid of approaching too rapidly; and at the distance of some five or six hundred yards, clumps of old trees, beeches, and ever-green oaks, and things of sombre foliage, dotted the park, only enlivened by here and there a herd of deer. Now and then, a milk-maid, a country woman going to church or market, a peasant, or at game-keeper, might be seen traversing the dry brown expanse of grass, and but rarely deviating from a beaten path, which led from one stile over the path wall to another. It was all sombre and monotonous: the very spirit of dulness seemed to hang over it; and the clouds themselves--the rapid sportive clouds, free denizens of the sky, and playmates of the wind and sunbeam--appeared to grow dull and tardy, as they passed across the wide space open to the view, and to proceed with awe and gravity, like timid youth in the presence of stern old age. Enough of the outside of the house. Let me take you into the interior, reader, and into one particular room--not the largest and the finest; but one of the highest. It was a little oblong chamber, with one window, which was ornamented--the only ornament the chamber had--with a decent curtain of red and white checked linen. On the side next the door, and between it and the western wall, was a small bed. A walnut-tree table and two or three chairs were near the window. In one corner stood a washing-stand, not very tidily arranged, in another chest of drawers; and opposite the fire-place, hung from nails driven into the wall, two or three shelves of the same material as the table, each supporting a row of books, which, by the dark black covers, brown edges, and thumbed corners, seemed to have a right to boast of some antiquity and much use. At the table, as you perceive, there is seated a boy of some fifteen years of age, with pen and ink and paper, and an open book. If you look over his shoulder, you will perceive that the words are Latin. Yet he reads it with ease and facility, and seeks no aid from the dictionary. It is the "Cato Major" of Cicero. Heaven! what a book for a child like that to read! Boyhood studying old age!