Bladys of the Stewponey by Sabine Baring-Gould

Half-a-crown ticket-holders alone admitted. We shilling people remain without. It is as well. The scene in the chapel cannot be edifying, considering who they are that press in, fox-hunting, dog-fighting, cocking, country gentry, some already half-tipsy, Lewis Falcon wholly so; the parson a man of indifferent character; the marriage the result of a fight.

Stourton Castle, once the favourite residence of King John, and possessing a venerable history, built originally of red sandstone, had been given a rakish modern aspect by a proprietor who conceived that what was old must be bad, and whose taste was at the service of the fashion of the day. He had delivered over this ancient structure to an architect to modernise at the period when taste was at the lowest ebb in England.