of a long straight road, which ran through the fields
for miles without even a bush to cheer it. The name of his place was
Nethercoats, and here he lived generally throughout the year, and
here he intended to live throughout his life.

His father had held a prebendal stall at Ely in times when prebendal
stalls were worth more than they are at present, and having also
been possessed of a living in the neighbourhood, had amassed a
considerable sum of money. With this he had during his life purchased
the property of Nethercoats, and had built on it the house in which
his son now lived. He had married late in life, and had lost his wife
soon after the birth of an only child. The house had been built in
his own parish, and his wife had lived there for a few months and had
died there. But after that event the old clergyman had gone back to
his residence in the Close at Ely, and there John Grey had had the
home of his youth. He had been brought up under his father's eye,
having been sent to no public school. But he had gone to Cambridge,
had taken college honours, and had then, his father dying exactly at
this time, declined to accept a fellowship. His father had left to
him an income of some fifteen hundred a year, and with this he sat
himself down, near to his college friends, near also to the old
cathedral which he loved, in the house which his father had built.

But though Nethercoats possessed no beauty of scenery, though the
country around it was in truth as uninteresting as any country
could be, it had many delights of its own. The house itself was as
excellent a residence for a country gentleman of small means as
taste and skill together could construct. I doubt whether prettier
rooms were ever seen than the drawing-room, the library, and the
dining-room at Nethercoats. They were all on the ground-floor, and
all opened out on to the garden and lawn. The library, which was
the largest of the three, was a handsome chamber, and so filled as
to make it well known in the University as one of the best private
collections in that part of England. But perhaps the gardens of
Nethercoats constituted its greatest glory. They were spacious
and excellently kept up, and had been originally laid out with
that knowledge of gardening without which no garden, merely as a
garden, can be effective. And such, of necessity, was the garden of
Nethercoats. Fine single forest trees there were none there, nor was
it possible that there shoul