might have seen there in his boyhood--a
small piano by Broadwood, always fastidiously polished, as if it had
just come from the shop, and bearing the date of 1780. Many houses
abound in similar furnishings. The characteristic of Denbury was that it
contained nothing else. These things were there, not as survivals of the
past, but as parts of a past which for the inmates had never ceased to
be the present. They were there as the natural appurtenances of a lady
who, so far as I knew, had never been near a railway till a special
train was run to convey mourners to her funeral.

Miss Froude matched her surroundings. During her later years she was
never visible till midday, by which time she would, in an upstairs
drawing room, be found occupying a cushionless chair at a large central
table, with a glass of port at her right hand and a volume of sermons at
her left. On either side of her stood a faithful attendant, one being a
confidential maid, the other a Miss Drake--an old, mittened companion,
hardly younger in appearance than herself--both of whom watched her with
eyes of solicitous reverence, and seemed always ready to collapse into
quasi-religious curtsies. Here she would receive such visitors as
happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential
villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy.

Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having
been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself. Originally
a diminutive dwelling--a relic of medieval times--he enlarged it to the
dimensions of a substantial country house, surrounding a court, and
connected with a medley of outbuildings--servants' offices, stables,
barns, and coach houses, one of these last containing as a solitary
recluse a high-hung yellow chariot, lined with yellow morocco, in which
the Archdeacon had been wont to travel before the battle of Waterloo,
and in which his grandchildren were never weary of swinging themselves.
If the parsonage and its appurtenances can in any sense be called
modern, they represented ideas and conditions which are far enough away
now. There was nothing about them more modern than the early days of
Miss Austen. The dining-room sideboard, with its long row of knife
boxes, whose sloping lids when lifted showed a glimmering of silver
handles, would have seemed familiar to Mr. Knightly, Mr. Woodhouse, and
Sir Thomas Bertram. Opposite the dining room was a library, very
carefully kep