f taxes. There is a little bridge, very much decayed, thrown across the
narrow moat to what was, in former days, the main entrance; but now the
door was nailed up, the bridge ruinous, and the path leading to it no
longer distinguishable in the long rank grass that covered the wet
meadows upon which the house looked out. It was a place that filled you
involuntarily with melancholy feelings; it breathed of loneliness and
desolation, changed times and fallen fortunes. I never beheld it but I
thought of Tennyson's "Mariana in the moated Grange"--

"Unlifted was the clicking latch,
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated Grange."

Brown and I, in some of our peregrinations, had stumbled upon this old
house; and after having walked round it, and speculated upon its
history, made our way through an open door into the spacious court-yard.
If the outside looked desolate, however, the interior was lively enough:
cattle, pigs, geese, ducks, and all the ordinary appurtenances of a
well-stocked farm, gave token that the old place was still tenanted; and
a large mastiff, who stalked towards us with a series of enquiring
growls, evidently demanding our business, and suspicious of our good
intentions, made us not at all sorry to see a stout good-natured-looking
dame, a perfect contradiction to the poet's woe-worn "Mariana," who,
after bidding Boxer hold his noise, volunteered a compendious history of
herself and husband in answer to our simple question as to the name of
the place. How good Farmer Nutt and herself had lived there for the last
seventeen years; how the old place belonged to Squire somebody, and
folks said that some gentry used to live in it in times past; what a
lonesome-like life they thought it when they first came, after living in
the gay town of Abingdon; how, by degrees, they got to think it pretty
comfortable, and found the plashy meadows good pasturage, and the house
"famous and roomy-like;" this, and much besides, did we listen to
patiently, the more so because an attempt or two at interruption only
served to widen the field of her discourse. The wind-up of it all,
however, was, that we were asked to walk in and sit down, and so we did.
A civil farmer's wife, a very common character in most parts of England,
is, I am sorry to say, somewhat too much of a rarity about Oxford;
whether their tempers are too severely tried by the "fast men," who hunt
drags and ride steeple-chases to the d