building.  Most of the windows were shuttered up, and as we drew nearer, the general evidences of desolation became more apparent.  The steps of the terraces were covered with patches of brown and golden moss.  The stone urns were some of them fallen in the deep grass, and some broken.  There were gaps in the rich balustrade here and there; and the two great fountains on either side of the lower terrace had long since ceased to fling up their feathery columns towards the sun.  In the middle of one a broken Pan, noseless and armless, turned up a stony face of mute appeal, as if imploring us to free him from the parasitic jungle of aquatic plants which flourished rankly round him in the basin.  In the other, a stalwart river-god with his finger on his lip, seemed listening for the music of those waters which now scarcely stirred amid the tangled weeds that clustered at his feet.

Passing all these, passing also the flower-beds choked with brambles and long waving grasses, and the once quaintly-clipped myrtle and box-trees, all flinging out fantastic arms of later growth, we came to the upper terrace, which was paved in curious patterns of stars and arabesques, with stones alternately round and flat.  Here a good-humored, cleanly peasant woman came clattering out in her sabots from a side-door, key in hand, preceded us up the double flight of steps, unlocked the great door, and admitted us.

The interior, like the front, had been modernized about a hundred and fifty years before, and resembled a little formal Versailles or miniature Fontainebleau.  Dismantled halls paved with white marble; panelled ante-chambers an inch deep in dust; dismal salons adorned with Renaissance arabesques and huge looking-glasses, cracked and mildewed, and mended with pasted seams of blue paper; boudoirs with faded Watteau panellings; corridors with painted ceilings where mythological divinities, marvellously foreshortened on a sky-blue ground, were seen surrounded by rose-colored Cupids and garlanded with ribbons and flowers; innumerable bed-rooms, some containing grim catafalques of beds with gilded cornices and funereal plumes, some empty, some full of stored-up furniture fast going to decay—­all these in endless number we traversed, conducted by the good-tempered concierge, whose heavy sabots awakened ghostly echoes from floor to floor.

At length, through an ante-chamber lined with a double file of grim old family portraits—­some so blackened with age and dust as to be totally indistinguishable, and others bulging hideously out of their frames—­we came to the library, a really noble room, lofty, panelled with walnut wood, floored with polished oak, and looking over a wide expanse of level country.  Long ranges of empty book-shelves fenced in with broken wire-work ran round the walls.  The painted ceiling represented, as usual, the heavens and some pagan divinities.  A dumb old time-piece, originally constructed to tell