There are no mail-coaches now, and the traveller by rail has no chance of getting a glimpse of Rowley Court, save a momentary one in the short interval between a cutting and a tunnel which are on the extreme border of the park. The Court itself stands towards the centre of the park on low ground encircled by wooded hills, towards which, in the good old times, avenues of stately oak, elm, and lime trees extended in long vistas. But under the dire pressure of necessity the woodman's axe has been frequently at work lately in these "cool colonnades," and the avenues are consequently much shorn of their fair proportions. The house is a big incongruous mass of two distinct styles of architecture--a grafting of Inigo Jones's plain façade and Corinthian pillars on a red-brick Elizabethan foundation, with projecting mullioned windows, octagonal turrets, quaintly-carved cornices, and ornamental doorways. Round the house runs a broad stone terrace bounded by a low balustrade, and flanked at each of the corners by a large stone vase, which, in the time of prosperity, had contained choice flowers varying with the season, but which were now full of cracks and fissures, and were overgrown with creeping weeds and common parasites. The very stones of the terrace were chipped moss-edged, and grass-fringed; the black-faced old clock in the stable-turret had lost one of its hands, while several of its gilt numerals had become effaced by time and tempest; the vane above it had only two points of the compass remaining for the brass fox, whose bushy tail had gone in the universal wreck, to point at; the pump in the stable-yard was dry; the trough in front of it warped and blistered; a piece of dirty oil-cloth had been roughly nailed over the kennel, in front of which the big old mastiff lay blinking in the sunshine; and a couple of cart-horses, a pair of superannuated carriage-horses, the Squire's old roan cob, and "the pony" (a strong, rough, undersized, Welsh-bred brute, with untiring energy and no mouth), were the sole tenants of the stables which had once been occupied by the best-bred hacks, and hunters of the county.