The bridge [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE GARDEN WALLS i THE RECTORY AT FLETTEN'S AMBO FACED THE HIGH Street. It had five windows on the first story and two on each side of the shell porch on the ground floor. Above these the roof sloped gradually in a wide gable that had for its eye and centre one large oval like a flattened wheel, its spokes driving inward to a circular pane of glass that lit the top-floor landing within the house. The façade of red brick faced with stone was the most modern part of the house and was as fine an example of English domestic architecture in the reign of Queen Anne as the county boasted. The ignorant who, exclaiming on the beauty of its proportions, the mellow charms of its weathered brick and stone, called it 'Georgian' laid themselves open to rebuke. The semi-circle of those stone door steps, the horseblocks, the very chains that swung between the low wooden posts that separated the flagstones of the sidewalk from the low privet hedge growing between them and the ground-floor window-sills, were all period details that should have conveyed, to a year, their place in the decade of their origin to any instructed eye. As for the shell porch, had it not been photographed, and sketched, and reproduced in drawing and engraving for every book on English domestic architecture that had appeared during the last hundred years? There was no excuse for not recognizing its date and fame as well as its beauty at a glance. 'As if,' said Miss Laetitia Morsley whose little book Nooks and Corners in Fletten's Ambo had been quite favourably reviewed in the Shorter Notices Column of The Times Literary Supplement, 'As if anybody could place our porch a day later than 1715 !' Once inside the house the going was not so easy. The panelled hall; the wide staircase; the narrow gallery that ran across the garden side of the first floor were Jacobean : the corridors had low, dark doors that opened into small