Chapter 10 - Page 2

and the apartment had a
comfortable, though not a lively appearance. It was hung with tapestry,
which the looms of Arras had produced in the sixteenth century, and which
the learned typographer, so often mentioned, had brought with him as a
sample of the arts of the Continent. The subject was a hunting-piece; and
as the leafy boughs of the forest-trees, branching over the tapestry,
formed the predominant colour, the apartment had thence acquired its name
of the Green Chamber. Grim figures in the old Flemish dress, with slashed
doublets covered with ribbands, short cloaks, and trunk-hose, were
engaged in holding grey-hounds, or stag-hounds, in the leash, or cheering
them upon the objects of their game. Others, with boar-spears, swords,
and old-fashioned guns, were attacking stags or boars whom they had
brought to bay. The branches of the woven forest were crowded with fowls
of various kinds, each depicted with its proper plumage. It seemed as if
the prolific and rich invention of old Chaucer had animated the Flemish
artist with its profusion, and Oldbuck had accordingly caused the
following verses, from that ancient and excellent poet, to be embroidered
in Gothic letters, on a sort of border which he had added to the
tapestry:-

Lo! here be oakis grete, streight as a line,
Under the which the grass, so fresh of line,
Be'th newly sprung--at eight foot or nine.
Everich tree well from his fellow grew,
With branches broad laden with leaves new,
That sprongen out against the sonne sheene,
Some golden red and some a glad bright green.

And in another canton was the following similar legend:--

And many an hart and many an hind,
Was both before me, and behind.
Of fawns, sownders, bucks and does,
Was full the wood and many roes,
And many squirrels that ysate
High on the trees and nuts ate.

The bed was of a dark and faded green, wrought to correspond with the
tapestry, but by a more modern and less skilful hand. The large and heavy
stuff-bottomed chairs, with black ebony backs, were embroidered after the
same pattern, and a lofty mirror, over the antique chimney-piece,
corresponded in its mounting with that on the old-fashioned toilet.

"I have heard," muttered Lovel, as he took a cursory view of the room and
its furniture, "that ghosts often chose the best room in the mansion to
which they attached themselves; and I cannot disapprove of the taste of
the disembodied printer of the Augsburg Confession." But he found it so
difficult to fix his mind upon the stories which had been told him of an
apartment with which they seemed so singularly to correspond, that he
almost regretted the absence of those agitated feelings, half fear half
curiosity, which