“That I can’t say, Sir. Bill Potts kept dark about that. He said one thing, though, that set us thinking.” “What was that?” “Why, that they went out in an emigrant ship as steerage passengers.” Brandon was silent. “Poor people!” said he at last. By this time the tailor had finished his coat and handed it back to him. Having obtained all the information that the man could give Brandon paid him and left. Passing by the inn he walked on till he came to the alms-house. Here he stood for a while and looked at it. Brandon alms-house was small, badly planned, badly managed, and badly built; every thing done there was badly and meanly done. It was white-washed from the topmost point of every chimney down to the lowest edge of the basement. A whited sepulchre. For there was foulness there, in the air, in the surroundings, in every thing. Squalor and dirt reigned. His heart grew sick as those hideous walls rose before his sight. Between this and Brandon Hall there was a difference, a distance almost immeasurable; to pass from one to the other might be conceived of as incredible; and yet that passage had been made. To fall so far as to go the whole distance between the two; to begin in one and end in the other; to be born, brought up, and live and move and have one’s being in the one, and then to die in the other; what was more incredible than this? Yet this had been the fate of his father. Leaving the place, he walked directly toward Brandon Hall. Brandon Hall was begun, nobody knows exactly when; but it is said that the foundations were laid before the time of Egbert. In all parts of the old mansion the progress of English civilization might be studied; in the Norman arches of the old chapel, the slender pointed style of the fifteenth century doorway that opened to the same, the false Grecian of the early Tudor period, and the wing added in Elizabeth’s day, the days of that old Ralph Brandon who sank his ship and its treasure to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy. Around this grand old Hall were scenes which could be found nowhere save in England. Wide fields, forever green with grass like velvet, over which rose groves of oak and elm, giving shelter to innumerable birds. There the deer bounded and the hare found a covert. The broad avenue that led to the Hall went up through a world of rich sylvan scenery, winding through groves and meadows and over undulating ground. Before the Hall lay the open sea about three miles away; but the Hall was on an eminence and overlooked all the intervening ground. Standing there one might see the gradual decline of the country as it sloped downward toward the margin of the ocean. On the left a bold promontory jutted far out, on the nearer side of which there was an island with a light-house; on the right was another promontory, not so bold. Between these two the whole country was like a garden. A little cove gave shelter to small vessels, and around this cove was the village of Brandon.