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Cross the road, go through the gate opposite, and either follow the road right out upon Ranmore Common, past the beautiful deep dell or ravine, or take a path which you will see on your left, a few yards from the gate. This winds through a very pretty wood, with glimpses of the valley here and there on the way, and eventually brings you out upon the carriage-drive to the house.
In no part of Spain could one so readily imagine one's self in Morocco; indeed, it is hard to realize that one is not there till the new European streets are reached. In the palace grounds, apart from the fine carriage-drive, with its seats and lamp-posts, when out of sight of the big hotels and other modern erections, the delusion is complete.
Its situation, too, is fine, far retired from the public road, and attainable by a winding carriage-drive; standing amid fertile fields, and with large trees in the vicinity. There is also a beautiful view from the mansion, adown the Kennebec. Beneath some of the large trees we saw the remains of circular seats, whereupon the family used to sit before the former house was burned down.
The night was overcast, dark, and inclined to be stormy, a cold, bleak, blusterous, northerly breeze was blowing off the lake and roaring through the branches of the leafless trees, and the look of the sky threatened rain; yet the wide, white carriage-drive loomed up ghostly through the darkness, and presently, when the eyes of the watchers grew accustomed to the gloom, they found that it would be easy for them to discern a mounted figure on the road at a distance of a hundred yards or so.
Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air.
I therefore followed him as he hopped along like some great, clumsy bird, and overtook him at the avenue gate, where he stood grasping the ironwork and peering through at the dark carriage-drive beyond. "He's a sly old jackal," he said, looking round at me and nodding his head in the direction of the Hall. "He's a deep old dog. And that's his bungalow, is it, among the trees?"
The gravel of the carriage-drive cut through my stockings, and a pebble bruised one of my heels so that I nearly fell. When I got safely under the shadow of the large cedar of Lebanon in the middle of the lawn, I stopped and looked up at my mother's window to see if she were a watcher. The blinds were down, there was no movement, no noise. Evidently she was asleep.
Soon after six one of the policemen went down to the high road to lie in wait for General Tenby, and about twenty minutes past the hour wheels rattled on the gravel of the short carriage-drive, and the General drove up to the door. He was a tall, soldierly-looking man of between fifty and sixty, with a red face and a keen blue eye, and a precise, jerky manner. "Ah, Lady Ruth!
All along its front ran a wide verandah, up the trellis-work of which green vines and blooming creepers trailed pleasantly, and beyond was the broad carriage-drive of red soil, bordered with bushy orange-trees laden with odorous flowers and green and golden fruit.
In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has studded the down with rustic seats and has shut its dangers out with railings, has cut a winding carriage-drive round the curves of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage-laurels at intervals in clearings made for that aesthetic purpose.
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