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Updated: May 7, 2025
It had grass and fine trees and winding walks, and little brooks fed by springs that glimmered in cradles of moss-grown, antiquated rock-work; no flowers or semblance of cultivation, but a general air of solitude and wildness that recommended it especially to me, and recalled as little as possible the great, gay city which surrounded it.
"That is, I suppose, because you neither see a shepherd or shepherdess wrought in worsted, and handsomely framed in black ebony, or a stuffed parrot, or a breeding-cage, full of canary birds, or a housewife-case, broidered with tarnished silver, or a toilet-table with a nest of japanned boxes, with as many angles as Christmas minced-pies, or a broken-backed spinet, or a lute with three strings, or rock-work, or shell-work, or needle-work, or work of any kind, or a lap-dog with a litter of blind puppies None of these treasures do I possess," she continued, after a pause, in order to recover the breath she had lost in enumerating them "But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out; and by that redoubted weapon hangs the mail of the still older Vernon, squire to the Black Prince, whose fate is the reverse of his descendant's, since he is more indebted to the bard who took the trouble to celebrate him, for good-will than for talents,
Through the interstices, you catch glimpses of well-kept lawns, generally ornamented with flowers, and with what the English call rock-work, being heaps of ivy-grown stones and fossils, designed for romantic effect in a small way.
Sea-sand and pebbles, washed clean, form the best bottom for the salt-water aquarium. It must be recollected that many of the marine tenants are burrowers, and require a bottom adapted to their habits. Some rock-work is considered essential to afford a grateful shelter and concealment to such creatures as are timid by nature, and require a spot in which to hide: this is true of many fishes.
The arch and whole interval are contained in one solid rock; the average width of that which makes the bridge is eighty feet, and beyond this the rock extends for a hundred feet or so in mural precipices, divided by only a single fissure, that makes a natural pier on the upper side of the bridge, and up which climb the hardy firs, ascending step by step on the noble rock-work till they overshadow you.
I confound these various products of antiquated art in a genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it.
Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its unmeaning ugliness fills them.
As they came on the scene, Lumley was finishing the construction of a dense screen of evergreen boughs, which surrounded the canvas to the doorway. Not far away an iron pot was slung on a cross-stick in gypsy style, and it was flanked by rock-work fireplaces which Maggie declared were almost equal to a kitchen range.
This sort being free from those leaky joints that are the invariable accompaniment of all-square cisterns; while globular ones have not got sufficient space at the bottom for rock-work, or those little hiding-places that delight the hearts of the denizens of the deep when they are free agents and in their own waters.
My companion led the way down this passage, through the door, and into a small garden containing some three or four old trees, a rustic seat, a sun-dial on an antique-looking fragment of a broken column, and a little weed-grown pond about the size of an ordinary drawing-room table, surrounded by artificial rock-work.
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