Thrushes and blackbirds hopped pompously about the lawns, and the
starlings chattered like old women on the roofs of the red gables.
The house itself was modelled as are nearly all such residences of
the Tudor period, the gables at either end making, with the hall,
the formation of the letter E so characteristic of the architecture
of that time. Only two additions had been made, oriel windows to
enlarge the rooms at each end of the gables; but they had been
executed, some seventy years before Sir William Hewitt Traill's
occupation of the place, by a man who had respect for the days of
King Harry and they had long since toned into the atmosphere. A great
tree of wisteria lifted itself above one of the windows, and on the
other a clematis clung with its wiry, brittle shoots.
The huge cedars, holding out their black-green fans of foliage like
Eastern canopies--the high yew-trees, to whom only age could bring
such lofty dimensions, all surrounded the old, red building and
wrapped it in a velvet cloak of warm security. Tulips in long
beds--brilliant mosaics in a floor of green marble--were let into
the lawn that stretched down the drive. Away on the horizon, the
rising ground about Wycombe showed blue through the soft spring
atmosphere, and in the middle distance, the ploughed fields--freshly
turned--glowed with the rich, red blood of the earth's fulness.
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