Excerpt from Marmaduke Wyvil or the Maid's Revenge: A Historical Romance

In s sequestered vale of England, not many miles from the county town of Worcester, there stands, in excellent preservation, even to the present day, one of those many mansions scattered through the land, which - formerly the manor houses of a race, now, like their dwellings, becoming rapidly extinct, the good old English squires - have, for the most part, been converted into farm-houses, since their old-time proprietors have, simultaneously with the growth of vaster fortunes, and the rise of loftier dignities, declined into a humbler sphere. In the days of which we write, however, Woolverton Hall was in the hands of the same family, which had dwelt there, father and son, for ages. It was a tall, irregular edifice, of bright red brick, composed of two long buildings, with steep flagged roofs and pointed gables, meeting exactly at right angles so as to form a letter L, the longer limb running due east and west, the shorter abutting on the eastern end, and pointing with its gable, southerly. In this south gable, near the top, was a tall, gothic, lanceolated window, its mullions and casings wrought of a yellowish sand-stone, to match the corner stones of all the angles, which were faced with the same material, beneath this window, which, as seen from without, appeared to reach nearly from the floor to the ceiling of the second story, was the date, 1559 - the numerals, several feet in length, composed of rusty iron, and above it, on the summit of the gable, a tall weather-cock, surmounted by a vane shaped like a dolphin, which had once been fairly gilded, but now was all dim and tarnished by long exposure to the seasons. To this part of the house there were no chimneys, which was the more remarkable, that the rest of the building was somewhat superfluously adorned with these appendages, rising like columns, quaintly wrought of brickwork in the old Elizabethan style. Corresponding to the gothic window in position, though by no means so lofty, a range of five large square-topped latticed windows, divided each into four compartments by a cross-shaped stone transom, ran all along that front of the other wing, which, with the abutting chapel - for such it seemed to be - formed the interior angle of the L. From the point of the western roof, to match, as it were, the weathercock which crowned the other gable, projected a long beam or horn of stone, at an angle of about ninety degrees, curiously wreathed with a deep spiral groove, not much unlike the tusk of that singular animal, the sword-fish.

This was all that could be seen of the main building from without, by a spectator looking at its southern front - for it stood in a court surrounded by a heavy wall of brick, with a projecting parapet and battlement of stone, flanked by short towers, with roofs shaped like extinguishers, and having its base washed by a broad rapid rivulet, which, rushing through a narrow artificial channel, along the eastern wall, expanded in front of the house into a wider bed, and after falling over a steep dam, swept off down the lone valley to the left, in a south-westerly direction.

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