rude marks and patterns; the handrail of the stair was carved in

countrified arabesque; a stout timber pillar, which did duty to support

the dining-room roof, bore mysterious characters on its darker side,

runes, according to the Doctor; nor did he fail, when he ran over the

legendary history of the house and its possessors, to dwell upon the

Scandinavian scholar who had left them. Floors, doors, and rafters made

a great variety of angles; every room had a particular inclination; the

gable had tilted towards the garden, after the manner of a leaning tower,

and one of the former proprietors had buttressed the building from that

side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick of a crane. Altogether,

it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and

nothing but its excellent brightness--the window-glass polished and

shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all

wreathed about with climbing flowers--nothing but its air of a

well-tended, smiling veteran, sitting, crutch and all, in the sunny

corner of a garden, marked it as a house for comfortable people to

inhabit. In poor or idle management it would soon have hurried into the

blackguard stages of decay. As it was, the whole family loved it, and

the Doctor was never better inspired than when he narrated its imaginary

story and drew the character of its successive masters, from the Hebrew

merchant who had re-edified its walls after the sack of the town, and

past the mysterious engraver of the runes, down to the long-headed, dirty-

handed boor from whom he had himself acquired it at a ruinous expense. As

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