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The gateway is in imitation of the ancient barbican; being a kind of outpost and flanked by towers; tho evidently for mere ornament, instead of defense. The front of the house is completely in the old style; with stone shafted casements, a great bow-window of heavy stone work, and a portal with armorial bearings over it, carved in stone.
There are two other doors at the ends of the aisles. The tower appears to have been added above the north aisle about 1463; it finishes with a shafted parapet and two open octagons with domical roofs, one above the other. Along the aisle roof a carved cornice runs, and above the trefoiled pointed clerestory windows is an arched corbelled cornice.
Next, ere one was aware, an arrow would whistle with a "Hisst!" past one's breast-bone and stand quivering, head-covered in the clay. Vicious things they were, too, steel-pointed and shafted with iron for half their length. But all waitings come to an end, even that of him who waits on a fair woman's arraying of herself.
"This wood is as dark as a wolf's mouth," said he to Tressilian, as they walked together slowly along the solitary and broken approach, and had just come in sight of the monastic front of the old mansion, with its shafted windows, brick walls overgrown with ivy and creeping shrubs, and twisted stalks of chimneys of heavy stone-work.
Olaf had given me a good plain sword in place of that which I broke, but I took a spear now, ashen shafted and strong, in the English way, that I might be armed as were my men, and I think that pleased them. The Danes came on fast, and they had not been miscounted.
It was flopping its lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with memory it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and shafted with secret malice: "How many really nice girls have you known in that time?"
Now among dark perpendicular firs, like the shafted columns of a cathedral; now through a hazel copse, matted with primroses and wild hyacinths; now under broad beeches in bright young leaves they threaded their way into the high road over Yalbury Hill, which dipped at that point directly into the village of Geoffrey Day's parish; and in the space of a quarter of an hour Fancy found herself to be Mrs.
The melancholy and uncertain gleams that she shot from between the passing shadows fell full upon the rifted arches and shafted windows of the old building, which were thus for an instant made distinctly visible in their ruinous state, and anon became again a dark, undistinguished, and shadowy mass.
Sitting by the side of these wells, and peering down into the shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of water, nor could I start any reflection with a lighted match. But in all of them I heard a certain sound: a thud thud thud, like the beating of some big engine; and I discovered, from the flaring of my matches, that a steady current of air set down the shafts.
This, as it comes down into the body of the tree, gets closer, but never opaque; it is always transparent, with crumbling lights in it letting you through to the sky; then, out of this, come, heavier and heavier, the masses of illumined foliage, all dazzling and inextricable, save here and there a single leaf on the extremities; then, under these, you get deep passages of broken irregular gloom, passing into transparent, green-lighted, misty hollows; the twisted stems glancing through them in their pale and entangled infinity, and the shafted sunbeams, rained from above, running along the lustrous leaves for an instant; then lost, then caught again on some emerald bank or knotted root, to be sent up again with a faint reflex on the white under-sides of dim groups of drooping foliage, the shadows of the upper boughs running in grey network down the glossy stems, and resting in quiet chequers upon the glittering earth; but all penetrable and transparent, and, in proportion, inextricable and incomprehensible, except where across the labyrinth and the mystery of the dazzling light and dream-like shadow, falls, close to us, some solitary spray, some wreath of two or three motionless, large leaves, the type and embodying of all that in the rest we feel and imagine, but can never see.
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