Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. NEW HOPES MAY BLOOM. Jocelyx's Rock was ten miles from Maudesley Abbey, and only one mile from the town of Shorn- cliffe. It was a noble place, and had been in the possession of the same family ever since the days of the Plantagenets. The house stood upon a rocky cliff, beneath which rushed a cascade that leapt from crag to crag, and fell into the bosom of a deep stream, that formed an arm of the river Avon. This cascade was forty feet below the edge of the cliff upon which the mansion stood. It was not a very large house; for most of the older part of it had fallen into ruin long ago, and the ruined towers and shattered walls had been cleared away: but it was a noble mansion notwithstanding. chapter{Section 4One octagonal tower, with a battlemented roof, still stood almost as firmly as it had stood in the days of the early Plantagenets, when rebel soldiers had tried the strength of their battering-rams against the grim stone walls. The house was built entirely of stone; the Gothic porch was ponderous as the porch of a church. Within all was splendour ; but splendour that was very different from the modern elegance that was to be seen in the rooms of Maudesley Abbey. At Jocelyn's Rock the stamp of age was upon every decoration, on every ornament. Square- topped helmets that had been hacked by the scimitars of Saracen kings, spiked chamfronts that had been worn by the fiery barbs of haughty English crusaders, fluted armour from Milan, hung against the blackened wainscoting in the shadowy hall; Scottish hackbuts, primitive arquebuses that had done service on Bosworth field, Homeric bucklers and brazen greaves, javelins, crossbows, steel- pointed lances, and two-handed swords, were in symmetrical design upon the dark and polished panels; while here and ...