24th February to 2d March.--We have now been here long enough to
know something of the place and the people. First, as to the
place: Where the farmhouse now is, there was once a famous
priory. The tower is still standing, and the great room where the
monks ate and drank--used at present as a granary. The house
itself seems to have been tacked on to the ruins anyhow. No two
rooms in it are on the same level. The children do nothing but
tumble about the passages, because there always happens to be a
step up or down, just at the darkest part of every one of them.
As for staircases, there seems to me to be one for each bedroom.
I do nothing but lose my way--and the farmer says, drolling, that
he must have sign-posts put up for me in every corner of the
house from top to bottom. On the ground-floor, besides the usual
domestic offices, we have the best parlor--a dark, airless,
expensively furnished solitude, never invaded by anybody; the
kitchen, and a kind of hall, with a fireplace as big as the
drawing-room at our town lodgings. Here we live and take our
meals; here the children can racket about to their hearts'
content; here the dogs come lumbering in, whenever they can get
loose; here wages are paid, visitors are received, bacon is
cured, cheese is tasted, pipes are smoked, and naps are taken
every evening by the male members of the family. Never was such a
comfortable, friendly dwelling-place devised as this hall; I feel
already as if half my life had been passed in it.

Out-of-doors, looking beyond the flower-garden, lawn, back yards,
pigeon-houses, and kitchen-gardens, we are surrounded by a
network of smooth grazing-fields, each shut off from the other by
its neat hedgerow and its sturdy gate. Beyond the fields the