This Moated Grange was situated some three miles N. by E. of Ashburton, in the midst of a lonely pasture, whose western limit touched the moor. There was no house nearer than the last house of the town. It stood on a tiny tributary of the Ashburn, which supplied the moat surrounding it with water; but both sluice and ditch, long years neglected, were choked with moss and growth, and the water slept stagnant, black between its islands of duckweed, and overshadowed throughout its whole compass by a rank luxuriance of bush and tree, whose lower branches dipped in liquid slime. From the inner circle of this moat--provision in long past days against the depredations of wolves--the ground rose somewhat to the wall, scarce seen for foliage, which ringed the whole estate; and here and there in its circumference great masses of ilex had gathered and flourished, building a darkness against the sky. Only in one spot was the fence of thicket broken, and that was where the bridle track, branching from the main road, crossed the moat by a stone bridge of a single span, and green with lichen, to the great entrance gate of the court. This gate was set in a tall rectangular turret of three sections, the uppermost plain, with a good window, the middle ornamented with crosses and lozenges in timber, its window square and small, the lowest containing the door, strong oak in a massive frame and studded with iron nuts. A low peaked roof, crested with a weathercock, surmounted this tower, which was moreover supported on its right by a building in which were the stables, and on its left by a shallow lean to, which served both as a buttress and for the porter’s lodge. Thence on both sides ran the containing wall of the property, whose whole aspect, in truth, suggested melancholy and decay. Between the outer gate and the house itself--the latter a heterogeneous congeries of parts, gabled and timbered--there was no stone in the narrow court but was green with moss, no broken shard which had fallen from a roof but had dulled its sharp edges against a generation of rain. Grass grew in the crannies of the walls, in the stone mullions of the windows, in the joints of the semi-circular steps before the main door. A strange still place, very remote in its sorrowful isolation from the picture the boy’s fancy had painted; yet, to the explorative soul of youth, not altogether without its uneasy charm. Brion, wondering a good deal, after his first curious inspection of the home which was henceforth to be his for good fortune or ill, put a wistful question or two to Clerivault, who had been playing the silent cicerone to his charge, furtively watchful the while of the impression things made on him:-- ‘Is it to be just you, and me, and Phineas, and William, and old Harlock and Uncle Quentin--only us, always, living alone here together?’ ‘And Nol porter,’ cried Clerivault cheerily: ‘Art forgetting him--the jolliest he of us all, and thrice the man in bulk of any other.’