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It is an old gray stone edifice, with a good many gables, and windows with mullions, and some of them extending the whole breadth of the gable. In some parts of the house, the windows seem to have been built up; probably in the days when daylight was taxed. The form of the Hall is multiplex, the roofs sloping down and intersecting one another, so as to make the general result indescribable.
The great egg-shaped court is a mosaic of incongruous masonry; above the porch, a wall of pebbles from the Gave, and of red bricks crossed like a tapestry design; opposite, fixt to the wall, a row of medallions in stone; upon the sides, doors of every form and age; dormer windows, windows square, pointed, embattled, with stone mullions garlanded with elaborate reliefs.
Sir John's room opened out of the great hall. It was of fair proportions, panelled from floor to ceiling and lighted by three long windows with leaded glass and stone mullions. At one end was a huge fireplace, looking cold and empty in summer-time, and over it, and elsewhere in the room, branches for candles were fixed in the wall.
The aisle windows are, like those of the clerestory, of the geometrical Decorated style, but of an earlier and simpler, uniform, design. They each contain three lights, and there is no variation or subordination of mouldings in the mullions. Unlike the clerestory windows, they are somewhat deeply recessed.
This window has been very much restored since the seventeenth century, when it was almost knocked in pieces. Wooden props served instead of mullions for many years to hold up the tracery above. The repair that has been effected retains the old design. Above each angle of the transept is a turret, octagonal in form. Neither of them is complete.
There is only one transept on the south so that the church is not fully cruciform, a peculiarity shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern window and the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and beauty, each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly charming manner in which the mullions are interlaced above.
Quaint and massive pilasters, black with the mire and soot of centuries, flanked the deep- set door; the windows were heavy with mullions and transoms, and strongly barred in the lower floor; but few of the panes were whole, and only here and there had any attempt been made to keep out the wind and rain by rags, paper, old shoes, old hats, and other ingenious contrivances.
Through the stone mullions of the projecting window at the right, a flush of fire-light looked pleasant and hospitable, and on the threshold were standing Lord Chelford and my old friend Mark Wylder; a faint perfume of the mildest cheroot declared how they had been employed. So I jumped to the ground and was greeted very kindly by the smokers.
I'll take the responsibility of satisfying you, Mrs Smith," said the doctor, in a prodigious hurry, ready to promise anything in this incautious moment, and bolting out of their little dark back-room, which the local architect's mullions had converted into a kind of condemned cell.
Farther off, on the top of some rising ground, appears an imposing structure, of an ancient style of architecture; this is the ancient residence of the Dukes of Champdoce. The left wing is a picturesque mass of ruins; the roof has fallen in, and the mullions of the windows are dotted with a thick growth of clustering ivy.
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