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To the right, for his own room stood in a wing of the mansion, the house shouldered its way into the gloom, a solemn, grey shadow, netted in a black tracery of climbing vine. In all the stretch of wall only two windows were lighted, and those yellow squares, he knew, belonged to his father. He had left the secret room, therefore.
Newsboys are nowhere, and every sound has died away. There stands the Old State House, peculiar and picturesque, rising with a look of other days, a relic of past time, against the deep blue sky, or webbing the full moon with the delicate tracery of its slender spars and signal halliards. And there stands no! there stood the old Town Pump.
The very walls are wrought into universal ornament encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches crowded with the statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended aloft as if by magic, and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb.
So there is a certain pleasure in tracing in a carven object, even though it be hideous, the patient, faithful, watchful work of the human hand guided at every instant by the human eye. And this Japanese tracery is by no means hideous. The plants and animals are well studied from reality, and truer than the average of popular designs in Europe a century ago, if not now.
The arbor-vitae along the banks marked tracery more delicate than any ever wrought by deftest craftsman in western window of an antique fane. Brighter and richer than any tints that ever poured through painted oriel flowed the glories of sunset. Dear, pensive glooms of nightfall drooped from the zenith slowly down, narrowing twilight to a belt of dying flame.
Its general section is that of a cyma reversa surmounted by a flattened torus, and its appearance that of a vase decorated with curvilinear and geometrical tracery. There is both originality and beauty in the contours of the profile and the arrangement of the tracery; the section as a whole is not unlike that of the inverted bell-shaped capitals at Karnak.
The shadow of the western forest marched over the clearing, covered the man's scorched shoulders with its cool mantle, and went on hurriedly to mingle with the shadows of other forests on the eastern side. The sun lingered for a while amongst the light tracery of the higher branches, as if in friendly reluctance to abandon the body stretched in the green paddy-field.
Again, the redent the 'tooth within tooth' of a French tracery may be necessary, to bite its glass. But the cusp, cuspis, spiny or spearlike point of a thirteenth century illumination, is not in the least necessary to transfix the parchment.
The door is like many another door of about the same period, with simple mouldings ornamented with small bosses, but the deeply recessed window above is most unusual. The tracery is gone, but the framing of the window remains, and is far more like that of a French door than of a window.
The outer wall was built of finely-dressed hard stone; and on this excellent material the sculptors of the time whether Persian or Byzantine, it is impossible to determine proceeded to carve in the most elaborate way, first a bold pattern of zigzags and rosettes, and then, over the entire surface, a most delicate tracery of foliage, animals, and fruits.
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