The year 1892, it will be remembered, was the first year of American copyright: and the great success of _David Grieve_ in America, following on the extraordinary vogue there of _Robert Elsmere_, in its pirated editions, brought me largely increased literary receipts. It seemed that I was not destined, after all, to "ruin my publishers," as I had despondently foretold in a letter to my husband before the appearance of _Robert Elsmere;_ but that, with regular work, I might look forward to a fairly steady income. We therefore felt justified in seizing an opportunity brought to our notice by an old friend who lived in the neighborhood, and migrating to a house north of London, in the real heart of Middle England. After leaving Borough Farm, we had built a house on a hill near Haslemere, looking south over the blue and purple Weald; but two years' residence had convinced me that Surrey was almost as populous as London, and that real solitude for literary work was not to be found there--at any rate, in that corner of it where we had chosen to build, and, also, while we were nursing our newly planted shrubberies of baby pines and rhododendrons, there was always in my mind, as I find from letters of the time, a discontented yearning for "an old house and old trees"! We found both at Stocks, whither we migrated in the summer of 1892. The little estate had then been recently inherited by Mrs. Grey, mother of Sir Edward Grey, now Lord Grey of Falloden. We were at first tenants of the house and grounds, but in 1896 we bought the small property from the Greys, and have now been for more than twenty years its happy possessors. The house lies on a high upland, under one of the last easterly spurs of the Chilterns. It was built in 1780 (we rebuilt it in 1908) in succession to a much older house of which a few fragments remain, and the village at its gates had changed hardly at all in the hundred years which preceded our arrival. A few new cottages had been built; more needed to be built; and two residents, intimately connected with the past of the village, had built houses just outside it. But villadom did not exist. The village was rich in old folk, in whom were stored the memories and traditions of its quiet past. The postmaster, "Johnny Dolt," who was nearing his eighties, was the universal referee on all local questions--rights of way, boundaries, village customs, and the like; and of some of the old women of the village, as they were twenty-five years ago, I have drawn as faithful a picture as I could in one or two chapters of _Marcella_.