road near it. Its walls, old and rusty, rose immediately from the
grass. Green blades and a few heads of daisies leaned trustingly
against the brown stone, all the sharpness of whose fractures had long
since vanished, worn away by the sun and the rain, or filled up by the
slow lichens, which I used to think were young stones growing out of
the wall. The ground was part of a very old dairy-farm, and my uncle,
to whom it belonged, would not have a path about the place. But then
the grass was well subdued by the cows, and, indeed, I think, would
never have grown very long, for it was of that delicate sort which we
see only on downs and in parks and on old grazing farms. All about the
house--as far, at least, as my lowly eyes could see--the ground was
perfectly level, and this lake of greenery, out of which it rose like a
solitary rock, was to me an unfailing mystery and delight. This will
sound strange in the ears of those who consider a mountainous, or at
least an undulating, surface essential to beauty; but nature is
altogether independent of what is called fine scenery. There are other
organs than the eyes, even if grass and water and sky were not of the
best and loveliest of nature's shows.

The house, I have said, was of an ancient-looking stone, grey and green
and yellow and brown. It looked very hard; yet there were some attempts
at carving about the heads of the narrow windows. The carving had,
however, become so dull and shadowy that I could not distinguish a
single form or separable portion of design: still some ancient thought
seemed ever flickering across them. The house, which was two stories in
height, had a certain air of defence about it, ill to explain. It had
no eaves, for the walls rose above the edge of the roof; but the hints
at battlements were of the merest. The roof, covered with grey slates,
rose very steep, and had narrow, tall dormer windows in it. The edges
of the gables rose, not in a slope, but in a succession of notches,