centre, however, grouping about an old house of red brick, which had
once been a manorial residence, but was now subdivided in all modes
that analytic ingenuity could devise, rose a portion of it which,
from one point of view, might seem part of an old town. But you had
only to pass round any one of three visible corners to see stacks of
wheat and a farm-yard; while in another direction the houses went
straggling away into a wood that looked very like the beginning of a
forest, of which some of the village orchards appeared to form part.
From the street the slow-winding, poplar-bordered stream was here
and there just visible.

I did not quite like to have it between me and my village. I could
not help preferring that homely relation in which the houses are
built up like swallow-nests on to the very walls of the cathedrals
themselves, to the arrangement here, where the river flowed, with
what flow there was in it, between the church and the people.

A little way beyond the farther end of the village appeared an iron
gate, of considerable size, dividing a lofty stone wall. And upon
the top of that one of the stone pillars supporting the gate which I
could see, stood a creature of stone, whether natant, volant,
passant, couchant, or rampant, I could not tell, only it looked like
something terrible enough for a quite antediluvian heraldry.

As I passed along the street, wondering with myself what relations
between me and these houses were hidden in the future, my eye was
caught by the window of a little shop, in which strings of beads and
elephants of gingerbread formed the chief samples of the goods
within. It was a window much broader than it was high, divided into
lozenge-shaped panes. Wondering what kind of old woman presided over