houses, palings rotting to pieces, and pigsties in ruins,
contributed, together with a grand collection of substantial and dingy
ricks of fine old hay--that most valuable but most gloomy looking
species of agricultural property--to the general aspect of desolation by
which the place was distinguished. One solitary old labourer, a dreary
bachelor, inhabited, it is true, a corner of the old roomy house,
calculated for the convenient accommodation of the patriarchal family of
sons and daughters, men-servants and maid-servants, of which a farmer's
household consisted in former days; and one open window, (the remainder
were bricked up to avoid taxes,) occasionally a door ajar, and still
more rarely a thin wreath of smoke ascending from one of the cold
dismal-looking chimneys, gave token that the place was not wholly
abandoned. But the uncultivated garden, the grass growing in the bricked
court, the pond green with duckweed, and the absence of all living
things, cows, horses, pigs, turkeys, geese, or chickens--and still more
of those talking, as well as living things, women and children--all
impressed on the beholder that strange sensation of melancholy which
few can have failed to experience at the sight of an uninhabited human
habitation. The one solitary inmate failed to relieve the pressing
sense of solitude. Nothing but the ringing sound of female voices, the
pleasant and familiar noise of domestic animals, could have done that;
and nothing approaching to noise was ever heard in the Moors. It was a
silence that might be felt.

The house itself was approached through a long, narrow lane, leading
from a wild and watery common; a lane so deeply excavated between
the adjoining hedge-rows, that in winter it was little better than a
water-course; and beyond the barns and stables, where even that apology
for a road terminated, lay the extensive tract of low, level, marshy
ground from whence the farm derived its title; a series of flat,
productive water-meadows, surrounded partly by thick coppices, partly
by the winding Kennett, and divided by deep and broad ditches; a few
pollard willows, so old that the trunk was, in some, riven asunder,
whilst in others nothing but the mere shell remained, together with here
and there a stunted thorn, alone relieving the monotony of the surface.

The only regular inhabitant of this dreary scene was, as I have before
said, the old labourer, Daniel Thorpe, who slept in one corner of the
house,