is called--is one of the loveliest of these favoured spots. It is a
little sheltered scene, retiring, as it were, from the village; sunk
amidst higher lands, hills would be almost too grand a word; edged
on one side by one gay high-road, and intersected by another; and
surrounded by a most picturesque confusion of meadows, cottages,
farms, and orchards; with a great pond in one corner, unusually
bright and clear, giving a delightful cheerfulness and daylight to
the picture. The swallows haunt that pond; so do the children.
There is a merry group round it now; I have seldom seen it without
one. Children love water, clear, bright, sparkling water; it
excites and feeds their curiosity; it is motion and life.

The path that I am treading leads to a less lively spot, to that
large heavy building on one side of the common, whose solid wings,
jutting out far beyond the main body, occupy three sides of a
square, and give a cold, shadowy look to the court. On one side is
a gloomy garden, with an old man digging in it, laid out in straight
dark beds of vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, onions, beans; all
earthy and mouldy as a newly-dug grave. Not a flower or flowering
shrub! Not a rose-tree or currant-bush! Nothing but for sober,
melancholy use. Oh, different from the long irregular slips of the
cottage-gardens, with their gay bunches of polyanthuses and
crocuses, their wallflowers sending sweet odours through the narrow
casement, and their gooseberry-trees bursting into a brilliancy of
leaf, whose vivid greenness has the effect of a blossom on the eye!
Oh, how different! On the other side of this gloomy abode is a
meadow of that deep, intense emerald hue, which denotes the presence
of stagnant water, surrounded by willows at regular distances, and
like the garden, separated from the common by a wide, moat-like
ditch. That is the parish workhouse. All about it is solid,