The
bread and meat were acceptable, and the beer was warming and
tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me.
To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in
the brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some
high wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea,
if there had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there
were no pigeons in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs
in the sty, no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and
beer in the copper or the vat. All the uses and scents of the
brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a
by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain
sour remembrance of better days lingering about them; but it was
too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that was gone,--and
in this respect I remember those recluses as being like most
others.
Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an
old wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long
enough to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden
of the house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but
that there was a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some
one sometimes walked there, and that Estella was walking away from
me even then.
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