a wide circular pan, filled deep with ashes from an extinct charcoal fire.  The high ceiling, once finely carved and gilt, was foul with dirt and cobwebs; the naked walls at either end of the room were stained with damp; and the cold of the marble floor struck through the narrow strip of matting laid down, parallel with the windows, as a foot-path for passengers across the wilderness of the room.  No better name for it could have been devised than the name which old Mazey had found.  “Freeze-your-Bones” accurately described, in three words, the Banqueting-Hall at St. Crux.

“Do you never light a fire in this dismal place?” asked Magdalen.

“It all depends on which side of Freeze-your-Bones his honor the admiral lives,” said old Mazey.  “His honor likes to shift his quarters, sometimes to one side of the house, sometimes to the other.  If he lives Noathe of Freeze-your-Bones—­which is where you’ve just come from—­we don’t waste our coals here.  If he lives South of Freeze-your-Bones—­which is where we are going to next—­we light the fire in the grate and the charcoal in the pan.  Every night, when we do that, the damp gets the better of us:  every morning, we turn to again, and get the better of the damp.”

With this remarkable explanation, old Mazey led the way to the lower end of the Hall, opened more doors, and showed Magdalen through another suite of rooms, four in number, all of moderate size, and all furnished in much the same manner as the rooms in the northern wing.  She looked out of the windows, and saw the neglected gardens of St. Crux, overgrown with brambles and weeds.  Here and there, at no great distance in the grounds, the smoothly curving line of one of the tidal streams peculiar to the locality wound its way, gleaming in the sunlight, through gaps in the brambles and trees.  The more distant view ranged over the flat eastward country beyond, speckled with its scattered little villages; crossed and recrossed by its network of “back-waters”; and terminated abruptly by the long straight line of sea-wall which protects the defenseless coast of Essex from invasion by the sea.

“Have we more rooms still to see?” asked Magdalen, turning from the view of the garden, and looking about her for another door.

“No more, my dear—­we’ve run aground here, and we may as well wear round and put back again,” said old Mazey.  “There’s another side of the house—­due south of you as you stand now—­which is all tumbling about our ears.  You must go out into the garden if you want to see it; it’s built off from us by a brick bulkhead, t’other side of this wall here.  The monks lived due south of us, my dear, hundreds of years afore his honor the admiral was born or thought of, and a fine time of it they had, as I’ve heard.  They sang in the church all the morning, and drank grog in the orchard all the afternoon.  They slept off their grog on the best of feather-beds, and they fattened on the neighborhood all the year round.  Lucky beggars! lucky beggars!”