What you like in every respect is difficult to meet with, residentially as well as matrimonially, for which sufficient reason Mr. Raidsford bought Moorlands without a house, and built the edifice that affronted Arthur Dudley, on it. Before the great building (like a factory, the Squire said) was thought of, Moorlands had been a picturesque stretch of poor ground, pleasant for strolling in the summer’s evenings, pleasant for picnics, pleasant to ride across, without leave asked or granted. It was bare, meagre land, which had not been turned up for years and years, the grass of which was nibbled close down by the sheep that could scarcely get a scanty living off it. There the daisies grew in the summer-time, there the children could gather enough to make chains for a whole village, there in the low parts the rushes sprang likewise in sufficient quantities to provide butterfly cages, swords, helmets, and umbrellas for the juvenile population of North Kemms and its vicinity. There was a wood where nuts grew abundantly, a little coppice wood on the side of a sloping hill, at the base of which the Kemm flowed on its way rejoicingly. In the Kemm were silver-backed trout and tench and perch. Many a time Arthur had angled in it, and there was a pleasant old lane, wide and grassy, almost like a forest glade, bordered by fine old timber, and entered by a gate swinging on one hinge, which led away not merely to the coppice, but to a little piece of rising ground where tradition said there had once been a mansion belonging to a certain wicked Sir Giles, whose heirs were now in foreign parts, and whose bones had been mouldering for a hundred years or more in the vaults underneath North Kemms church. Certainly the lane led straight up to the hillock, on which some remains of walls, some traces of a former building, were to be found; but there was nothing much to confirm the idea of a mansion ever having occupied the site, though the gossips affirmed Sir Giles’ had once been a great house, which was razed to the ground on account of the wickedness enacted within it. Rather hard on the house, certainly, considering Sir Giles, the perpetrator of so much wickedness, lay in consecrated ground, snugly incased in lead and oak; but none the less likely to be true on that account, perhaps. A few rose-trees grew in what tradition said had once been Sir Giles’ pleasure garden; and there was a goodly bush of sweet briar, to say nothing of a few evergreens and flowers, such as London pride, Canterbury bells, Solomon’s seal, double daisies, and such like, scattered about in beds that had apparently been laid out in the Dutch style. But still there was no trace of winding walks, or sweeping drive, of yew hedges, courtyard or pleasaunce; nothing left to tell of a great man’s residence ever having occupied the site where Mr. Raidsford’s palace was afterwards erected.