I met a white-haired old countryman, who proved to be the most
intelligent soul in the neighborhood. He put his cane to his chin, shut
and opened his eyes, and at last told me in broad Yorkshire, that he
thought the place I was looking for must be what they called "the
bishop's house," where Squire Dickinson lived. Set at last upon the
right track, I walked across two swampy meadows that bordered the Idle
River--pertinently named--till I came to a solitary farmhouse with a
red-tiled roof. Some five or six slender poplar-trees stood at the back
of it, and a ditch of water at one end, where there had been evidently
an ancient moat--"a moated grange."

It was a desolate spot, and was rendered more so just then by the coming
up of a thunder-storm, whose "avant courier," the wind, made the slender
poplars and osiers bend and twist. Squire John Dickinson, the present
inhabitant of the house, which is owned by Richard Monckton Milnes, the
poet, gave me a hearty farmer's welcome. I think he said there had been
one other American there before; at any rate he had an inkling that he
was squatted on soil of some peculiar interest to Americans. He
introduced me to his wife and daughters, healthy and rosy-cheeked
English women, and made me sit down to a hospitable luncheon. He
entertained me with a discourse upon the great amount of hard work to be
done in farming among these bogs, and wished he had never undertaken it,
but had gone to America or Australia. The house, he said, was rickety
enough, but he contrived to make it do. It was, he thought, principally
made of what was once a part of the stable of the Manor House.

The palace itself has now entirely disappeared; "but," said my host,
"dig anywhere around here and you will find the ruins of the old
palace." Dickinson said that he himself was reared in Austerfield, a few
miles off in Yorkshire; and that a branch of the Bradford family still