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He has a great desire, however, to read such works in the old libraries and chapter-houses to which they belong; for he thinks a black-letter volume reads best in one of those venerable chambers where the light struggles through dusty lancet windows and painted glass; and that it loses half its zest, if taken away from the neighbourhood of the quaintly-carved oaken book-case and Gothic reading-desk.
In those days, between the Abbey and the sea, there stood a town of seven towers and four rich churches, surrounded by a wall of twelve stones' thickness, making it, as men reckoned then, a place of strength and much import; and the monks, glancing their eyes downward from the Abbey garden on the hill, saw beneath their feet its narrow streets, gay with the ever passing of rich merchandise, saw its many wharves and water-ways, ever noisy with the babel of strange tongues, saw its many painted masts, wagging their grave heads above the dormer roofs and quaintly-carved oak gables.
As for the stick, burned as it was, I had no difficulty in identifying the quaintly-carved knob at the top. It was the heavy beechen stick which I had snatched out of Silas's hand, and which I had restored to Ambrose on his claiming it as his own.
Pieces of quaintly-carved cedar posts were found here, and their condition of decay, compared with that of the cedar beams at “El Moro,” “indicated great antiquity.” The place of this ruin is now one of the consecrated places of the Village Indians; it has “a Zuni altar” which is constantly used and greatly venerated.
It's a nice thing to have friends, I know; but, oh, what a relief it is sometimes to get rid of them!" She kissed him, and let him go. Left by himself, to compare his wife's innocent mistake with the terrible enlightenment that awaited her, Linley's courage failed him. He leaned on the quaintly-carved rail that protected the outer side of the landing, and looked down at the stone hall far below.
A quaintly-carved side board held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very old man dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, passed, and the sun was within a hand's- breadth of the horizon when a man emerged from the "palace," bearing a massive chair of ebony, quaintly-carved, and draped with a magnificent leopard's skin, which he placed immediately before the open door, midway between the house and ourselves, and departed.
Little by little, all the windows of the surrounding houses were jammed with faces each window a strange picture in its quaintly-carved wooden frame. The crowd was there the living crowd eager for death palpitating with excitement each heart beating with one pitiless feeling of greedy cruelty. And the bells still rang ceaselessly their merry, joyous, fête-like peal.
The Italian refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden told on the remodelling of the house within, raised the principal apartments to an upper floor a change to which we owe the grand staircases of the time surrounded the quiet courts by long "galleries of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with quaintly-interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly-carved chairs and costly cabinets.
There were skeletons leaning in unexpected corners, strange charts upon the walls, a wilderness of books and pamphlets in all manner of unexpected places, mingled with quaintly-carved curios, gods from West African temples, implements of savage warfare, butterfly nets. It was a room which Lord Ashleigh was never able to enter without a shudder.
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