lowing into
scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow
in color, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of
the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness
but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt, petulant
child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man's
grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks and she will
be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing,
capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task with all
the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.

It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, which
is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the desert, that we
next meet with Robert and Catherine ELsmere. The rectory of Murewell
occupied the highest point of a gentle swell of ground which sloped
through cornfields and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the
south, and climbed away on the north toward the long chalk ridge of the
Hog's Back. It was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor
state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small stretch
of grass and a low hedge between it and the road. A few tall firs
climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern
side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down toward the
village at its foot--a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks,
the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red wars, and
the masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the
floweriness and the gayety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow
and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village-roofs and
gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed
brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths
of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over
the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house,
now it was half ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the
squire of the clay had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should
exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished
the rectory: so that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany
doors and carved cupboard fronts, in which Robert delighted, and in
which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure.

Altogether a quiet, Englis