which for about the length of a mile winds among gardens and orchards,
laden with fruit, between two chains of gentle and fertile hills.

Here, singly or in pairs, are scattered cottages, which bespeak a comfort
and a rural luxury, less often than our poets have described the
characteristics of the English peasantry. It has been observed, and there
is a world of homely, ay, and of legislative knowledge in the
observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a
bird-cage at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better
and wiser than their neighbours; and such humble tokens of attention to
something beyond the sterile labour of life, were (we must now revert to
the past,) to be remarked in almost every one of the lowly abodes at
Grassdale. The jasmine here, there the vine clustered over the threshold,
not so wildly as to testify negligence; but rather to sweeten the air
than to exclude it from the inmates. Each of the cottages possessed at
its rear its plot of ground, apportioned to the more useful and
nutritious product of nature; while the greater part of them fenced also
from the unfrequented road a little spot for the lupin, the sweet pea, or
the many tribes of the English rose. And it is not unworthy of remark,
that the bees came in greater clusters to Grassdale than to any other
part of that rich and cultivated district. A small piece of waste land,
which was intersected by a brook, fringed with ozier and dwarf and
fantastic pollards, afforded pasture for a few cows, and the only
carrier's solitary horse. The stream itself was of no ignoble repute
among the gentle craft of the Angle, the brotherhood whom our
associations defend in the spite of our mercy; and this repute drew
welcome and periodical itinerants to the village, who furnished it with
its scanty news of the great world without, and maintained in a decorous
custom the little and single hostelry of the place. Not that Peter
Dealtry, the proprietor of the "Spotted Dog," was altogether contented to