THE GATE HOUSE 339 



addressed it in the simple imperative, " Cammina" 

 " walk" ; and the villagers of Bingham's Melcombe 

 must have half expected to see the eagles take their 

 long meditated flight, when, with unconscious poetry, 

 they first called them, not by their own name, 

 but by that of their most prominent and sugges- 

 tive feature, "the Wings." "When I passed," 

 they may still sometimes be heard to say, "by the 

 wings this morning." 



In front of the main building, and hiding it so 

 much from view that, on a first approach, it is often 

 taken for the house itself, is the "Gate House," 

 probably the oldest part of the whole. With its 

 comparative want of architectural features, its 

 strongly barred folding doors, its solid walls, in 

 one place nine feet thick, its massive supporting 

 buttresses, it must have been intended, in those 

 troublous times, as a protection for the more artistic 

 dwelling-house which was to rise behind it. Once 

 inside the court to which the gate house leads, you 

 seem to have passed, at a step, into an older world, 

 into the middle of the Middle Ages. A sense of 

 ineffable repose steals over you. You lose all 

 account of time. Two small sundials, indeed, placed 

 one above the other, faintly assert the existence of 

 movement somewhere, but it is not movement there ; 



