Plummer Place. The house stood roomily and shadily in
ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a
shrubbery at each side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable
garden, the whole intersected by winding gravel walks,
of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that a man might
do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the
middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with
a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable
and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden
of Italy sloping to the sea. There was also a barn with
stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a
lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison
often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and
she hoped he had the money to live up to them. The
Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a
succession of "girls" left on account of the milking,
and the lane was useful as an approach to the backyard
by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter. It
was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order
to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances
which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison
often declared that she could put up with the grounds if
it had stopped there. It did not stop there. Though I
was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison in the kitchen,
she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a
cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble
mantelpiece. She had an icehouse and a wine cellar, and
a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with
every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune