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Updated: May 6, 2025
It may perchance have been a flourishing hostelry say a century ago, but at the present time its fortunes have reached a very low ebb, and only the lower portion of the building is used for that purpose. The remaining storeys within the spacious courtyard are let to artisans and others of the lower classes. They all have balustraded balconies, on some of which we saw clothes hanging out to dry.
This part of the building contains not improbably the shell of the corresponding portion of the original inn. The doors of the first floor all open into one of the wide balustraded galleries or verandas so common in the genuine old English hostelry.
The Black Bear is an ancient inn, large and respectable, with balustraded staircases, and intricate passages and corridors, and queer old pictures and engravings hanging in the entries and apartments. The park-gate of Blenheim stands close to the end of the village street of Woodstock.
The main building is two stories high with a decked gable roof, heavily balustraded between large, arched quadruple chimney stacks at each end, corners heavily quoined with marble and ends without fenestration other than a round bull's-eye window in each.
Externally it is magnificent, especially now that the side towards the city has been terraced and balustraded; but internally its decorations are quite unworthy of modern America. The floors, the doors, the cornices and mouldings are cheap in material, dingily garish in colour. Especially painful are the crude blue-and-yellow mosaic tiles of the corridors.
Until within the last few years the coigne of the old balustraded gallery was connected on the right with the modern brick mass by an ancient wood-work bridge, coeval at least with the oldest portion of the building as it stands.
From the portico, reached by two grand circular and balustraded flights of steps, the view extends over an immense fish-pond, as long and wide as the grand canal at Versailles, beginning at the foot of a grass-plot which compares well with the finest English lawns, and bordered with beds and baskets now filled with the brilliant flowers of autumn.
And with the manner of one perfectly acquainted with the house, he ascended a massively balustraded staircase. The walls were darkly paneled; from the shadowy recesses pictured faces of men and women looked down at him.
Here, in their midst, she belonged, and here, had the world been otherwise ordained, she might have lived on in one continuous, shining spring. At the corner of the Common, foursquare, ample, painted a straw colour trimmed with white, with its high chimneys and fan-shaped stairway window, its balustraded terrace porch open to the sky, was the eighteenth century mansion occupied by Dr. Ledyard.
Not so many doors from the palace entrance there is a station of French soldiers and a sentinel on duty. The palace, judging from the broad staircase, the balustraded platform, the tower itself, and other tokens, may have been a grand one centuries ago; but the locality is now a poor one, and the edifice itself seems to have fallen to unaristocratic occupants.
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