The huge gilt edifice is approached by steps, and so tall, that it might be let off in floors, for sleeping-rooms for all the Carabas family.

An awful bed! A murder might be done at one end of that bed, and people sleeping at the other end be ignorant of it.

Gracious powers! fancy little Lord Carabas in a nightcap ascending those steps after putting out the candle! The sight of that seedy and solitary splendour was too much for me.
I should go mad were I that lonely housekeeper--in those enormous galleries--in that lonely library, filled up with ghastly folios that nobody dares read, with an inkstand on the centre table like the coffin of a baby, and sad portraits staring at you from the bleak walls with their solemn Mouldy eyes.

No wonder that Carabas does not come down here often.
It would require two thousand footmen to make the place cheerful.

No wonder the coachman resigned his wig, that the masters are insolvent, and the servants perish in this huge dreary out-at-elbow place.
A single family has no more right to build itself a temple of that sort than to erect a Tower of Babel.