You
enter these palaces by back-doors. 'That was the way the Carabases got
their peerage,' the misanthropic Ponto said after dinner.
Well--I rang the bell at a little low side-door; it clanged and jingled
and echoed for a long, long while, till at length a face, as of a
housekeeper, peered through the door, and, as she saw my hand in my
waistcoat pocket, opened it. Unhappy, lonely housekeeper, I thought. Is
Miss Crusoe in her island more solitary? The door clapped to, and I was
in Castle Carabas.
'The side entrance and All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator
hover the mantelpiece was brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when
a Capting with Lord Hanson. The harms on the cheers is the harms of the
Carabas family.' The hall was rather comfortable. We went clapping up a
clean stone backstair, and then into a back passage cheerfully decorated
with ragged light-green Kidderminster, and issued upon
'THE GREAT ALL.
'The great all is seventy-two feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and
thirty-eight feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the
birth of Venus, and Ercules, and Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most
famous sculpture of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco,
represents Painting, Harchitecture and Music (the naked female figure
with the barrel horgan) introducing George, fust Lord Carabas, to the
Temple of the Muses.
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