The house sat upon a great, smooth lawn, which sloped down to the river, now a dull, steel blue in the red and waning Christmas eve. A short, rude wharf lay a little way in the river, which softly lapped the wooden piles. A little distance from the house, to the left, lay a spacious, old, brick-walled garden, now all russet brown and gold and purple in ragged splendor like a beggar princess. Great bare clumps of crape-myrtle and syringas and ancient rose trees bordered the wide walk which led from the rusty iron garden gate down to the end of the garden. Here a long line of gnarled and twisted lilac bushes clung to the brick wall; lilacs and crumbling wall had held each other in a strong embrace for more than a hundred years. Outside the garden, the wide lawn was encircled by what had once been a shapely yew hedge, which had grown into a ragged rampart of ancient trees, black and squat and melancholy as yew trees always grow. A great gap in this hedge opened upon a long, straight lane leading to the highroad and beyond that lay the primeval woods. On each side of the lane were cedar trees which had once stood young and straight like soldiers, but were now, as the yew trees, old and bent like a line of veterans tottering in broken ranks. Under the somber branches of the yew hedge was a walk of cracked flagstones, known, since Harrowby was first built, as the “Ladies’ Walk.” For when the paths and lanes about the place were too wet for the dainty feet of ladies, this flagged path was their exercise ground. The negroes, of course, peopled it with the dead and gone ladies of Harrowby, who generally took, upon those broken stones, their last walk upon earth, and who found it haunted, not by the ghosts of their predecessors but by the joys, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, the perplexities, the loves, and the hates which had walked with them there, in cool summer eves, in red autumn afternoons, in bitter winter twilights, and in the soft and dewy mornings of the springtime.