26 THE ROSE OF MAY. 
called Burton Grange, a house so desolate and 
deserted as to have gained from a poetical friend 
of ours the appropriate name of The Dead House. 
It was a dreary and most lonesome place; the 
very bricks of which it was built were bleached 
by long exposure to wind and weather; there 
seemed no life within or about it. Every trace 
of furniture and wainscot was gone from its 
interior, and its principal rooms were the deposi- 
tories of old ploughs and disused ladders; yet 
still its roof, floors, and windows were in decent 
repair. It had once upon a time been a well- 
conditioned house; had been moated, and its 
garden-wall had been terminated by stately stone 
pillars surmounted by well-cut urns, one of which, 
at the time we were there, lay overgrown with 
grass in the ground beneath; the other, after a 
similar fall, had been replaced, but with the wrong 
end uppermost. To add still more to its lone- 
someness, thick, wild woods encompassed it on 
three sides, whence of an evening, and often 
too in the course of the day, came the voices 
of owls and other gloomy wood-creatures. 
“ There’s not a flower in the garden,” said 
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