cruiser of much the same type as the ship I had soared out of yesterday.
I filled in the details of the inspiration as I walked and when at last I
saw her head away into the far distance the final touch was given.

When I drew near the house the road showed a tendency to meander, and as
I was getting pretty hungry and counted on luncheon with the laird, be he
patriot or traitor, I left the highway and followed a path across a
clover field. Though the house and its farm were so near, and I could see
half a dozen other homesteads not far away, yet there was not a living
soul in sight, or any sound save from the peewees and the gulls. I don't
know how to convey the impression of out-of-the-worldness and
back-of-beyondness produced by this sense of silence and space, and by
the look of the house and its whole surroundings. The path sloped up to
it through a grass paddock, rather like the approach to the doctor's
house, only this grass was short and well-tended and there were one or
two flower beds before the door and ivy on one of the walls (where the
wind was least destructive); and though the mansion was weather-beaten
and plain and grey, it had nothing of the bleak and chilly aspect of the
other house. It simply looked as though it had lived a long and stormy
life and had now gone to sleep.

At one side stretched a high-walled garden with the tops of a few stunted
trees just showing their heads, and close at the back of the place one
could see a collection of farm buildings, very like the mansion
architecturally, only greyer and more weathered. A fairly steep roof,
crow-stepped gables, rough-cast walls, and rather small windows seemed to
my untutored eye to be the chief features of the whole stone gathering.

"Somebody very primitive obviously lives here," I said to myself as I
pulled the bell.