Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/431

Rh The walls are wainscoted with the brave old English oak, far advanced in its seeming transformation into ebony. All you ever read in romance or veritable history about halls hung with armour of crusaders and other knightly raiders, interspersed with spoils of the chase, is here realized in full; and you see that even Sir Walter Scott has not exaggerated the fact in this respect. Conspicuous on the genealogical tree of these weapons and outfittings for war, is the helmet usually worn, says the loyal guide-book, "by the usurper Cromwell." Here, too, is the doublet in which Lord Brooke was killed at Lichfield, in 1643. Three great Gothic windows are set out in deep recesses, as if to embrace and welcome the first and last light of the day, and to soften and diffuse it, a tinted smile, over the spacious apartment and its embellishments. But if the outside world smiles inward through these great windows so graciously, their outward vision opens upon a scene of exquisite beauty, which few can be found to equal. Here a vista deploys before the view full of all the attractions that nature and art can give to a landscape. What a is to the richest drawing-room, the gentle and classic Avon is to this variegated scenery, as a portion of it, and as a reflecting medium of all its other features. It meanders through the landscape as a limpid hem to lawn, field, grove,