I

HARE STREET


How loudly and boisterously the wind roared to-day across the low-hung,
cloud-smeared sky, driving the broken rack before it, warm and wet out
of the south! What a wintry landscape! leafless trees bending beneath
the onset of the wind, bare and streaming hedges, pale close-reaped
wheat-fields, brown ploughland, spare pastures stretching away to left
and right, softly rising and falling to the horizon; nothing visible but
distant belts of trees and coverts, with here and there the tower of a
hidden church overtopping them, and a windmill or two; on the left, long
lines of willows marking the course of a stream. The road soaked with
rain, the grasses heavy with it, hardly a human being to be seen.

I came at last to a village straggling along each side of the road; to
the right, a fantastic-looking white villa, with many bow-windows, and
an orchard behind it. Then on the left, a great row of beeches on the
edge of a pasture; and then, over the barns and ricks of a farm, rose
the clustered chimneys of an old house; and soon we drew up at a big
iron gate between tall red-brick gateposts; beyond it a paling, with a
row of high lime trees bordering a garden lawn, and on beyond that the
irregular village street.

From the gate a little flagged pathway leads up to the front of a long,