cut off a slice of the nobly proportioned morning-room, containing a
beautifully-mullioned casement at the side, knocked a French window
through one end, so that he could wander in and out from the terrace,
knocked a door through the other so that it opened on a corner of the
hall, forgot all about the fireplace, and left his descendants to make
the best of things.

This long, narrow, comfortless strip of a room was Dick's armoury, den,
and refuge. It was furnished with extreme simplicity. At the further end
two rusty leather arm-chairs flanked a cast-iron stove in the corner, and
were balanced in the other and darker corner by a knee-hole writing-desk
littered with seeds and bulbs and spurs and bits of fishing tackle, and
equipped for its real purpose with a forbidding-looking pen and inkpot,
and a torn piece of weather-beaten blotting-paper. At about a third of
the way down from the terrace door a great screen, covered with American
cloth, cut the room almost in two. Against this screen stood two suits
of beautifully-finished fifteenth-century Italian armour. Between them
and the further end of the room ran a long deal table, with a green
baize cover. An odd, dilapidated chair or two stood lonely and
disconsolate against the opposite wall. The floor was covered with old
matting and a few faded rugs. The walls, however, and the cases ranged
along them gave an air of distinction to the room. There hung trophies
of arms of all sorts--a bewildering array of spiky stars like the
monstrous decorations on the breast of a Brobdingnagian diplomatist, of
guns and pistols of all ages and nationalities, of halberds, pikes, and
partisans, of curved scimitars, great two-handed swords, and long,
glittering rapiers, with precious hilts. There, too, were coats of chain
mail and great iron gauntlets, and rows of dinted helmets formed a
cornice round the gallery.