ch, apart from the incomparable
beauty of their surroundings, have a charm of their own, elusive but
distinct. Originally it had been no more than a couple of cottages,
thatched and low-eaved, but her husband in his lifetime had dealt
with these so successfully by building out a dining-room with
bedrooms above on one side, a drawing-room and billiard-room, again
with bedrooms above, on the other, and a long row of servants' rooms
and offices, that now it was commodious enough to take in a tolerably
large party in extreme comfort.

It is true that he might have built something quite as commodious at far
less expense by pulling down the old and beginning again, but, on the
other hand, the amusement and employment he got out of it was cheap at
the additional price.

The house stood screened from the river by a thick-set hawthorn hedge,
inside which was a garden of a couple of acres in extent, in which was
combined the charm of antiquity with the technique of skilful modern
gardening. Unlike many English gardens, which are laid out to be active
in, this was clearly a place for the lazy and the lounger. There were no
tennis courts, no croquet lawns, no place, in fact, where any game could
be played that demanded either extent or uniformity of surface. A wavy,
irregular lawn, all bays and angles and gulfs of green, was fitted into
the headlands and promontories of garden beds, as the sea is fitted into
the land; but the voyager never got to open sea, so to speak, but was
always turning round corners into other gulfs.

It was impossible to imagine a place less formally laid out, or one,
considering the extent of it, where you could walk so short a way in the
same direction.

There were no straight lines anywhere, an omission fatal in the eyes
of a formalist, but paths, broad paths of grass, or narrower paths of
old paving-stone, meandered about in a manner that could hardly fail
to please.

On each side of such paths were garden beds, no mere ribbons, but wide,
deep spaces of well-nourished earth, where just now June made jungle.
Here you could sit and become part of the general heat and fragrance,
and lose your identity in summer, or, moving a little, find a tree, no
shrub, but a big living elm in tower of leaf and panoply of spreading
bough, to be cool under. Pigeons from the big dovecot in front of the
house afforded to a leisure mind a sufficiency of general conversation,
or formed a cooing chorus of approval if anyb