The children do nothing but tumble about the passages, because there always happens to be a step up or down, just at the darkest part of every one of them.
As for staircases, there seems to me to be one for each bedroom.

I do nothing but lose my way--and the farmer says, drolling, that he must have sign-posts put up for me in every corner of the house from top to bottom.

On the ground-floor, besides the usual domestic offices, we have the best parlor--a dark, airless, expensively furnished solitude, never invaded by anybody; the kitchen, and a kind of hall, with a fireplace as big as the drawing-room at our town lodgings.

Here we live and take our meals; here the children can racket about to their hearts' content; here the dogs come lumbering in, whenever they can get loose; here wages are paid, visitors are received, bacon is cured, cheese is tasted, pipes are smoked, and naps are taken every evening by the male members of the family.

Never was such a comfortable, friendly dwelling-place devised as this hall; I feel already as if half my life had been passed in it.
Out-of-doors, looking beyond the flower-garden, lawn, back yards, pigeon-houses, and kitchen-gardens, we are surrounded by a network of smooth grazing-fields, each shut off from the other by its neat hedgerow and its sturdy gate.