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Updated: June 15, 2025
This chamber was in a way goodly, but yet grim to look on; for the walls were all of black ashlar stone close-jointed, and the floor black also, but of marble polished so wholly that it was as dark water, and gave back the image of Birdalone's dear feet and legs as she went thereon.
Four or five waterings are allowed to percolate from it to the various regions which are thus brought under cultivation, and besides this the main supply of the river itself is artificially increased at the same time. The dam has been constructed of granite ashlar taken from quarries near Aswan. These quarries are the very same from which the ancient obelisks were hewn.
The front was all of good ashlar work, but it was carven all over, without heed being paid to the joints of the stones, into one picture of a flowery meadow, with tall trees and bushes in it, and fowl perched in the trees and running through the grass, and sheep and kine and oxen and horses feeding down the meadow; and over the door at the top of the stair was wrought a great steer bigger than all the other neat, whose head was turned toward the sun-rising and uplifted with open mouth, as though he were lowing aloud.
His dream had taken root there; it would be cruel cowardice to wrench it up. He got up, the sun striking him on the face, from which the west wind pressed back his hat brim as if to let the daylight see it. The dust of his travels was on it, and the roughness of his new beard, and it was harsh in some of its lines, and severe as an ashlar from the craftsman's tool.
The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground, till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.
The murderer had hidden for a night, and then, defiantly, surrendered to the watch, and the watch were taking him to the watch-house in the ashlar basement of the Town Hall. The feeble horse between the shafts of the cart moved with difficulty through the press, and often the coloured staves of the constables came down thwack on the heads of heedless youth.
It is no square-built gloomy palace of black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray gives it us: no; rough as the North rocks, as the Iceland deserts, it is; with a heartiness, homeliness, even a tint of good humor and robust mirth in the middle of these fearful things. The strong old Norse heart did not go upon theatrical sublimities; they had not time to tremble.
The ashlar and semi-columns, not being well bonded and deeply headed into the rubble cores, split and bulged, and the cores, for want of a proper proportion of lime, diminished and crushed to pieces.
A Mansion fronting, we may say, four ways; for it is of quadrangular form, with a wet moat from the Lake begirdling it, and has a spacious court for interior: but the principal entrance is from the Town side; for the rest, the Building is ashlar on all sides, front and rear.
To-day Dr. Chalkfield, the Mayor for the year, being absent, the corn-merchant took the big chair, his eyes still abstractedly stretching out of the window to the ashlar front of High-Place Hall. There was one case only, and the offender stood before him.
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