134 The Trotter. 



house, in other hands, might have been one of the finest in the 

 country. No saying what traditions were connected with that old 

 building, or what historical lore was attached to Ashby Grange. 

 At the time of our tale, however, it was little better than a domestic 

 ruin, and the iron finger of decay was fast completing a wreck 

 which neglect had commenced. Built some centuries back, the old 

 house presented a glorious specimen of the architecture of that day, 

 but now fast crumbling to decay. How preferable (as some anti- 

 quarian has observed) is the aspect of the fragments of some once 

 great edifice to that which such a house as we are now describing 

 presents to our view. There the tall gable reaches its chimney-stack 

 bleakly to the sky, and the green banks scarcely mark out the 

 obliterated gardens. Time has done his worst there, and the death 

 struggle is over. One can trace the terraces of the gardens restored 

 to grazing land again with the calmness with which one walks over 

 the grass-grown grave of a friend long dead ; but here we see the 

 very action of decomposition going on the crumbling stucco of the 

 ceiling in all (save the few rooms which are still kept inhabited), 

 feeding the vampire ivy, the tattered tapestry yet hanging on the 

 walls, the picture napping in its broken frame, the machinery of the 

 clock fallen through the roof into the chapel, and the fresh ferns 

 sprouting out in the choked gutters, and yet the masonry in all its 

 firmness, without a stone displaced, the sculpture as sharp as the 

 first day it was carved, the solid oak staircase yet entire this is 

 a melancholy without a redeeming touch of hope or comfort ; and 

 yet, desolate as it appears now, within fifty years Ashby Grange was 

 a habitable and comfortable house, and a moderate outlay a few 

 years ago would have saved all the time-honoured associations con- 

 nected with the old building, and preserved a house that thousands 

 could not now restore. 



Such was Ashby Grange when I first saw it; but there were old 

 labourers living in the parish who could remember the days when 

 it wore a very different aspect. The estate had been in the family 

 for generations, and the house of West was as old, and at one time 

 as honourable, as any in the county. Sam's grandfather was a true 



