ten-mile drive, and that I told the gentleman the fare, so as there might
be no bother between him and William Tyler, my man, at the end; and he
agreed to it in a liberal off-hand kind of way, like a man who doesn't
care much for money. As to farms within ten miles of here, there are a
dozen at least, one way and another--some small, and some large."

"Do you know of any place in the ownership of a gentleman who would be
likely to lend his house to a friend?"

"I can't say I do, sir. They're tenant-farmers about here mostly, and
rather a roughish lot, as you may say. There's a place over beyond
Crosber, ten miles off and more; I don't know the name of it, or the
person it belongs to; but I've noticed it many a time as I've driven by;
a curious old-fashioned house, standing back off one of the lanes out of
Crosber, with a large garden before it. A queer lonesome place
altogether. I should take it to be two or three hundred years old; and I
shouldn't think the house had had money spent upon it within the memory
of man. It's a dilapidated tumbledown old gazabo of a place, and yet
there's a kind of prettiness about it in summer-time, when the garden is
full of flowers. There's a river runs through some of the land about half
a mile from the house."

"What kind of a place is Crosber?"

"A bit of a village on the road from here to Portsmouth. The house I'm
telling you about is a mile from Crosber at the least, away from the main
road. There's two or three lanes or by-roads about there, and it lies in
one of them that turns sharp off by the Blue Boar, which is about the
only inn where you can bait a horse thereabouts."