was crossed laterally and diagonally by great beams of
black-painted oak. The windows, which are full of diamonded panes, were
lowbrowed, deep-sunken, long, and shallow. The door had a porch, and
this porch was covered with creepers. In summer time climbing roses and
honeysuckle bloomed there. The garden ran right up to the house, and
touched it all round. The fragrant sweet-william, nestling against the
walls, looked as though it were a natural fringe. Without the faintest
sense of primness, or even of orderliness, everything had an air of
being precisely where it ought to be, and conveyed somehow a suggestion
of having been there always. The house looked less as if it had been
built than as if it had grown, and this feeling was heightened by the
vegetable growth about it and upon it--the clinging ivy, the green
house-leek, the purple and golden moss on the roofs and walls. In the
course of its three hundred years the Oak House had stood long enough to
be altogether reconciled to nature, and half absorbed by it.

In 1850--which, though it seem a long while ago, is well within human
memory--and for many years before, the Oak House was tenanted by a
farmer who bore the name of Fellowes, a sturdy and dogmatic personage,
who was loud at the table of the market ordinary once a week, and for
the most part silent for the rest of his life at home. The gray mare
was the better horse. Excepting within doors at the Oak House, Fellowes
ruled the hamlet. There were no resident gentry; the clergyman was
an absentee; the tiny church was used only as a chapel-of-ease; and
Fellowes was the wealthiest and most important personage for a mile or
two. He was a little disposed to be noisy, and to bluster in his show of
authority, and therefore fell all the more easily captive to his wife,
who had a gift for the tranquil saying of unpleasant things which was
reckoned quite phenomenal in Beacon Hargate. This formidable woman was
ruled in turn by her daughter Bertha.

Bertha, unless looked at through the eyes of susceptible young manhood,
would by no means be pronounced formidable. She was country-bred and
quite rustic; but there are refinements of rusticity; and for Beacon
Hargate, Bertha was a lady. She would have been a lady anywhere
according to her chances; for she was naturally sensitive to refining
influences, and of a nature which, remembering how strong it was, was
curiously tender.

It was May, in the year 1850--mid-May--and the we