text:  The Hall abounded in concealed staircases and iron hiding-places connected with a variety of marvellous traditions of the civil wars; besides a walled-up suite of chambers haunted as becomes a walled-up suite of chambers; and justice-rooms and tapestried-rooms to which the long abandonment of the house and the heated imaginations of the few menials left in charge of its desolate vastness attributed romances likely enough to have provoked the laughter of a matter-of-fact man like the owner of Lexley Park