Page:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (emended first edition), Volume 1.djvu/43

Rh the scanty herbage;—but these were netnot [sic] my property.

Near the top of this hill, about two miles from Linden-Car, stood Wildfell Hall, a superannuated mansion of the Elizabethan era, built of dark grey stone,—venerable and picturesque to look at, but, doubtless, cold and gloomy enough to inhabit, with its thick stone mullions and little latticed panes, its time-eaten airholes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation,—only shielded from the war of wind and weather by a group of Scotch firs, themselves half blighted with storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the Hall itself. Behind it lay a few desolate fields, and then, the brown heathclad summit of the hill; before it (enclosed by stone walls, and entered by an iron gate with large balls of grey granite—similar to those which decorated the roof and gables—surmounting the gateposts), was a garden,—once, stocked with such hard plants and flowers as could best brook the soil and climate, and such trees and shrubs