Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/382

 home of a weird legend, it was unblest with either as far as we could make out. A promise of romance there was to the eye, but no fulfilment!

One old chamber, called "the oak room," interested us greatly on account of its exceedingly curious carvings. This chamber was panelled from floor to ceiling. For about three-quarters of the height upwards the panelling was adorned with "linen-pattern" work; above this, round the top of the room, forming a sort of frieze, ran a series of most grotesque carvings, the continuity of the frieze being only broken just above the fireplace, which space was given over to the heraldic pride of various coats-of-arms. Each panel that went to form the frieze had some separate, quaint, or grotesque subject carved thereon; some of the designs, indeed, were so outrageous as to suggest the work of a craftsman fresh from Bedlam! There is a quaintness that overruns its bounds and becomes mere eccentricity.

The grotesque creations of the old monks, though highly improbable and undesirable beings, still looked as though they might have actually lived, and struggled, and breathed. The grotesque creations of the carver of the panels in this room failed in this respect. One could hardly, in the most romantically poetic mood, have given the latter credit for ever existing in this or any other planet where things might be ordered differently; they are all, or nearly all, distinctly impossible. On one of these panels is shown a creature with the head and neck of a swan, the body of a fish (from which body proceed scaled wings of the prehistoric reptile kind),