There are eight bedrooms and an oak-panelled hall, with a fireplace big enough to sit in and a place for your elbow and your pint pot. There is only one modern fireplace in the whole house. Most of the bedrooms lead out of one another, and some of ’the domestic offices,’ as Mr Cardew Thompkins would call them, are a little unusual. The larder, for instance, is in the present dining-room, and so is the back door, so that while you are at lunch your butcher might arrive. But these are details which, no doubt, could be altered. There is a powdering closet, also a pump, not actually in the drawing-room, as the Gidger said, but in the ’potato shed,’ which leads immediately out of it. The potato shed has a glass roof and will make a tiny conservatory. The back of the house faces south-west and is a regular sun-trap. Both the cottages are half-timbered and pargetted, with splendid beams and diamond-leaded windows, and roses and honeysuckle everywhere, and such a garden!—all on a slope, of course, with little steps here and there to break the levels, flowers, strawberries, and vegetables all mixed up, and lots of trees, and bush fruit, and a little copse with bluebells; already the exciting green spikes are showing, and there are a few snowdrops out. It’s the dream-house, and the Gidger found it! We have got through a tremendous lot of business since we first saw the cottage, and I hope Michael will think we have done all the sensible things we ought. Ross telegraphed to the lawyers and they sent down a surveyor yesterday afternoon to value it and see it wouldn’t tumble down the moment we bought it. The verdict is ’that it will outlast many a modern villa.’ I wanted a builder to give me an estimate for doing it up. I asked the owner, who advised me to go to Jones, who had always given her satisfaction. So to Jones I went. He is the quaintest character. His hair and his whiskers grow with such velocity that on a Friday night he is double the size he was the previous Saturday, after his weekly hair-cut. He wears old stained overalls and a battered hat, and altogether looks a most frightful ruffian, the sort of person one would prefer not to meet in a dark lane. But his eyes redeem him, they are so blue and clear. The second time I saw him he said,— ’Have you any relations in the Isle of Man, mum?’ ’No,’ I said, ’why?’ ’Oh, because my wife comes from there, and she was a Miss Ross, and when the captain come to the door yesterday, so nice and friendly like, my wife says to me afterwards, "I do see Uncle John in ’im.’" (How delightful these unexpected relationships are, and I suppose he thinks I call my brother by his surname!)