A little afterwards in the same letter he says: ‘From there (_i.e._ from the blacksmith’s shop) to Kestercham every inch of the way is familiar to me. The tall late-flowering limes--I never knew why they were so late in flower, but they always were--the hedgerows in which it was my boyish pleasure to search for the clematis and the wild rose, or to whisk off the heads of the ox-eyed daisies for violating my father’s rule that flowers, like young ladies, ought not to be staring, the two trim high-gabled farmhouses, hardly distinguishable one from the other, between which the road passed (the daughter of one of the farmers in these houses was a teacher in the Kestercham Sunday school), then the cottages, straggling at first, but gradually becoming closer until you descend a steepish hill and come upon a gully where a torrent rushes across the road in the winter or even in the summer if it is unusually wet, and you go through the green gate where the path turns off the high road and leads to the vicarage. That green gate was a great feature in the life of the vicar’s family at Kestercham; it marked the boundary between the vicarage and the world, the world being the parish of Kestercham with its barely three hundred souls. A walk to the green gate was a regular incident of the day; my father and I took it always, even if we did not go farther, after breakfast. I think he must have taken that walk nearly five thousand times since we came to Kestercham. Perhaps a hundred yards or a little more before reaching the gate on the way from X----, if you lift your eyes, you may catch a distant glimpse of the church nestling sleepily among the elms (unless it is summer, and the foliage so thick as to spoil the view), or if the wind is from the south, and your ears are sharp, you may hear the cawing of the rooks from their immemorial home in the churchyard. No gun was ever pointed at those rooks, or at the old owl that lived in the venerable riven elm between the churchyard and the Grange; for Mr. Seaford, the farmer who occupied the Grange, protected the owl as being the enemy of the mice which infested his farm and stackyard, and the rooks were the traditional favourites of my father, who looked upon them as possessing a special right of sanctuary within the precincts of the church.’ The vicarage, as this letter shows, lies off the high-road, nearly half a mile away from it. You go through several fields of oats and barley (or perhaps of mangoldwurzel and turnips, if it is the turn for root crops), then through a hay-field, generally the last to be cut in the village, then past the church and the moated Grange, and finally a sharp turn in the road or lane brings you in sight of the single cadaverous-looking poplar by the vicarage gate. The house itself is invisible until you stand at the front door; it is literally embedded in the trees.