We arrived at last at a little hamlet remote from the highroads. The cottages, though old-fashioned, were singularly neat and trim—flower-plots before them, and small gardens for kitchen use behind. A very ancient church, with its parsonage, backed the broad village-green; and opposite the green stood one of those small quaint manor-houses which satisfied the pride of our squires two hundred years ago. On a wide garden-lawn in front were old yew-trees cut into fantastic figures of pyramids and obelisks and birds and animals; beyond the lawn, on a levelled platform immediately before the house, was a small garden, with a sundial, and a summer-house or pavilion of the date of William III., when buildings of that kind, for a short time, became the fashionable appendage to country-houses, frequently decorated inside with musical trophies, as if built for a music-room; but, I suspect, more generally devoted to wine and pipes by the host and his male friends. At the rear of the house stretched an ample range of farm-buildings in very good repair and order, the whole situated on the side of a hill, sufficiently high to command an extensive prospect, bounded at the farthest distance by the sea, yet not so high as to lose the screen of hills, crested by young plantations of fir and larch; while their midmost slopes were, in part, still abandoned to sheep-walks; in part, brought (evidently of late) into cultivation; and farther down, amid the richer pastures that dipped into the valley, goodly herds of cattle indolently grazed or drowsily reposed. We dismounted at the white garden-gate. A man ran out from the farmyard and took our ponies; evidently a familiar acquaintance of Tracey’s, for he said heartily, “that he was glad to see his honour looking so well,” and volunteered a promise that the ponies should be well rubbed down, and fed. “Master was at home; we should find him in the orchard swinging Miss Lucy.” So, instead of entering the house, Tracey, who knew all its ways, took me round to the other side, and we came into one of those venerable orchards which carry the thought back to the early day when the orchard was, in truth, the garden. A child’s musical laugh guided us through the lines of heavy-laden apple-trees to the spot where the once famous prizeman—the once brilliant political thinker—was now content to gratify the instinctive desire _tentare aërias vias_—in the pastime of an infant. He was so absorbed in his occupation that he did not hear or observe us till we were close at his side. Then, after carefully arresting the swing, and tenderly taking out the little girl, he shook hands with Percival; and when the ceremony of mutual introduction was briefly concluded, extended the same courtesy to myself.