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The baptistery is accessible by steps both from the basilica and the narthex. Attached to it is the consignatorium, as at Parenzo. This retains its mosaic pavement, with a design of stags drinking at a vase, and the text "Sicut cervus," &c. It is kept covered with pebbles to preserve it. The baptistery itself is octagonal externally and circular internally, with niches and several doors.
On the top of the hill is a long building, with two curious twin towers and a dome, built of red brick faced with white marble. Here is situated the chief entrance. You descend from the spacious entry-hall a long well staircase cut in the rock and lighted from above, until you reach a superb octagonal chamber of white marble ornamented with statues and Oriental divans covered with Persian silk.
Around the entablature of the noble octagonal rotunda are repeated Bruno Louis Zimm's three panels, representing "The Struggle for the Beautiful." In another, Bellerophon is about to mount Pegasus. Orpheus walks ahead with his lyre, followed by a lion, representing the brutish beasts over whom music hath power.
It was an octagonal box placed high on one side of the church on a level with the gallery, and reached by a spiral staircase. Above it hung the highly ornate and altogether extraordinary sounding-board and canopy. There was no sign of paint anywhere, but the yellow pine, of which seats, gallery, and pulpit were all made, had deepened with age into a rich brown, not unpleasant to the eye.
There are no doubt other houses which have an octagonal dining-room and a church organ; but no other house, I am sure, has a bedroom like that which Mr. Pulitzer occupied. Although it appeared to form part of the house, it did not, in fact, do so.
The trees are of the kinds mentioned before. A pretty octagonal summer-house, with its roof supported by pillars, occupies one of the highest points of the plateau, and commands a superb view of the scenery before described. From this a walk of three miles leads through the woods to the palace.
The croisée is similar in structure, but, due to its greater height, appears even more slender and aerial. The towers with their flèches, together with these original octagonal lanterns with their pinnacles, lend an undescribable grace, elegance, and majesty to what would otherwise have been a rather unwieldy edifice.
The second, in the stable-yard of the adjoining manor house, is the refectory, a good, vaulted apartment, with a row of octagonal columns down the centre. At the W. end it opens into the kitchen, in which will be discovered a fireplace. Of the priory church, which abutted on the N. wall of the so-called "chapter house," nothing is left but a single trefoiled piscina and one of the vaulting shafts.
*The South-east Transept*, lying between the retro-choir and the chapter-house, into which it opens, is in the main Decorated, though its window tracery is perhaps somewhat later, being almost flamboyant in character. It was altered from the original Norman apse, and in the walls bases of the earlier work remain. It has an eastern aisle, separated from it by a single octagonal pillar.
But all these formed only the accompaniment, the ground-tone, to more reasoned, more vital enjoyments. Before her, beyond the carriage sweep, lay the square lawn enclosed by red walls and by octagonal, pepper-pot summer-houses, whereon unwillingly, yet in obedience to the wild justice of revenge Roger Ormiston had shot the Clown, half-brother to Touchstone, race-horse of mournful memory.
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