A melancholy seemed to
gather over the landscape as we proceeded, for our course lay by
shadowy woods, and across naked heaths, and along lonely roads, marked
by some of those sinister names by which the country people in England
are apt to make dreary places still more dreary. The horrors of
"Thieves' Wood," and the "Murderers' Stone," and "the Hag Nook," had
all to be encountered in the gathering gloom of evening, and threatened
to beset our path with more than mortal peril. Happily, however, we
passed these ominous places unharmed, and arrived in safety at the
portal of Newstead Abbey, highly satisfied with our green-wood foray.
THE ROOK CELL.
In the course of my sojourn at the Abbey, I changed my quarters from
the magnificent old state apartment haunted by Sir John Byron the
Little, to another in a remote corner of the ancient edifice,
immediately adjoining the ruined chapel. It possessed still more
interest in my eyes, from having been the sleeping apartment of Lord
Byron during his residence at the Abbey. The furniture remained the
same. Here was the bed in which he slept, and which he had brought with
him from college; its gilded posts surmounted by coronets, giving
evidence of his aristocratical feelings.
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