Portions, however, were built of red freestone;
and if I had looked at it longer, no doubt I should have admired it more.
We merely drove round it from the rear to the front. It stands in my
memory rather like a college or a hospital, than as the ancestral
residence of a great English noble.
We left the Park in another direction, and passed through a part of Lord
Sefton's property, by a private road.
By the by, we saw half a dozen policemen, in their blue coats and
embroidered collars, after entering Knowsley Park; but the Earl's own
servants would probably have supplied their place, had the family been at
home. The mansion of Croxteth, the seat of Lord Sefton, stands near the
public road, and, though large, looked of rather narrow compass after
Knowsley.
The rooks were talking together very loquaciously in the high tops of the
trees near Sir Thomas Birch's house, it being now their building-time.
It was a very pleasant sound, the noise being comfortably softened by the
remote height. Sir Thomas said that more than half a century ago the
rooks used to inhabit another grove of lofty trees, close in front of the
house; but being noisy, and not altogether cleanly in their habits, the
ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them.
Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present
settlement in a grove behind the house. Ever since that time not a rook
has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair
of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old
rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together.
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