deer, looking soaked, leave
quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist
air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise,
coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my
Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view, and a view in
Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all
day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged
pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost's Walk, all night. On Sundays, the
little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold
sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in
their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in the early
twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge, and seeing the light of a fire
upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased
by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up
man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock
says she has been bored to death.
    Therefore my Lady Dedlock has come away from the place in Lincolnshire, and
has left it to the rain, and the crows, and the rabbits, and the deer, and the
partridges and pheasants. The pictures of the Dedlocks past and gone have seemed
to vanish into the damp walls in mere lowness of spirits, as the housekeeper has
passed along the old rooms, shutting up the shutters. And when they will next
come forth again, the fashionable intelligence - which, like the fiend, is
omniscient of the past and present, but not the future - cannot yet undertake to
say.
    Sir Leicester Dedlock is only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet
than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He
has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills, but would be
done up without Dedlocks. He would on the whole admit Nature to be a good idea
(a little low, perhaps, when not enclosed with a park-fence), but an idea
dependent for its execution on your great county families. He is a gentleman of
strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness, and ready, on the
shortest notice, to die any death you may please to mention rather than