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Updated: May 8, 2025
"Why, then," said Lance, "since you are all of a mind, we will go draw the cover for the old badger; and I promise you that the Hall is not like one of your real houses of quality where the walls are as thick as whinstone-dikes, but foolish brick-work, that your pick-axes will work through as if it were cheese.
In the common way there is wanted a copper fixed in brick-work, and for a family of any considerable size a brewhouse is indispensable. On the contrary, the machine is set up opposite any fire place, and the pipe enters the chimney, or is put into the fire place.
And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire population; a /frigidarium/ where five hundred people could swim together; a /tepidarium/ and a /calidarium/* on the same proportions, born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared.
But on the Jersey, Dring declares that neither light nor fire was ever allowed. Often their provisions were not dealt out in time to be cooked that day, and then they had to fast or eat them raw. The cooking was done in the "Great Copper" under the forecastle. This was a boiler enclosed in brick-work about eight feet square. It was large enough to contain two or three hogsheads of water.
When the fire-place is finished, this door-way is to be closed by a few bricks laid without mortar, or a tile or piece of stone confined in its place by means of a rebate made for that purpose in the brick-work. As often as the chimney is swept, the chimney sweeper removes this temporary wall or stone, which is very easily done, and when he has finished his work, he again puts it in its place.
The mighty heat thus generated sufficient as it is to detach the iron from its close alliance with the earthy materials and to render the metal out as a pure stream rushing white-hot from the vent is sufficiently confined by a few feet of brick-work, one side of which is therefore at the temperature of molten iron, while the other is at a temperature not much exceeding that of the air.
It was in reality a brick-work structure, consisting of four chambers with arched roofs supporting a gun platform protected by a parapet pierced with embrasures, the brick-work in its turn being protected by an earth-bank thrown up in front of it in the form of a glacis.
An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses, so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches from the ancient brick-work.
There was no sound or sight that would seem to indicate the vicinity of any human being, as Arvina, passing the mouth of a small gorge or hollow scooped out of the bosom of a soft green hill, paused at the arch of a low but richly ornamented grotto, hollowed out of the face of the rock, and supported by a vault of reticulated brick-work, decorated elegantly with reliefs of marble and rich stucco.
The old English cottage, with its Tudor brick-work, and its overhanging beams, the old English labourers with the stains of English soil upon them, made the setting; and in the midst, sat the "new man," from the New World, holding the stage, just as Ellesborough the New Englander was accustomed to hold it, at Great End Farm.
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