e architecture of ancient
Rome--chiefly by means of five lank pilasters, which stretched from the
top of it to the bottom. Between the pilasters was the glass front door,
to the right of them the drawing room windows, to the left of them the
windows of the dining-room, above them a triangular area, which the
better-class servants knew as a "pendiment," and which had in its middle
a small round hole, according to the usage of Palladio. The classical
note was also sustained by eight grey steps which led from the building
down into the drive, and by an attempt at a formal garden on the
adjoining lawn. The lawn ended in a Ha-ha ("Ha! ha! who shall regard
it?"), and thence the bare land sloped down into the village. The main
garden (walled) was to the left as one faced the house, while to the
right was that laurel avenue, leading up to Mrs. Failing's arbour.

It was a comfortable but not very attractive place, and, to a certain
type of mind, its situation was not attractive either. From the
distance it showed as a grey box, huddled against evergreens. There
was no mystery about it. You saw it for miles. Its hill had none of the
beetling romance of Devonshire, none of the subtle contours that prelude
a cottage in Kent, but profferred its burden crudely, on a huge bare
palm. "There's Cadover," visitors would say. "How small it still looks.
We shall be late for lunch." And the view from the windows, though
extensive, would not have been accepted by the Royal Academy. A valley,
containing a stream, a road, a railway; over the valley fields of barley
and wurzel, divided by no pretty hedges, and passing into a great and
formless down--this was the outlook, desolate at all times, and almost
terrifying beneath a cloudy sky. The down was called "Cadbury Range"
("Cocoa Squares" if you were young and funny), because high upon
it--one cannot say "on the top," there being scarcely any tops
in Wiltshire--because high upon it there stood a double circle of
entrenchments. A bank of grass enclosed a ring of turnips, which
enclosed a second bank of grass, which enclosed more turnips, and in
the middle of the pattern grew one small tree. British? Roman? Saxon?
Danish? The competent reader will decide. The Thompson family knew it
to be far older than the Franco-German war. It was the property of
Government. It was full of gold and dead soldiers who had fought with
the soldiers on Castle Rings and been beaten. The road to Londinium,
having forde