As we have said, Mrs. Allingham alters her compositions as little as possible when painting from Nature, but in this case she has omitted a church tower that stood just to the right of the inn, and added the tall trees behind it. The omission was due to a feeling that the house itself was the point, and a quite sufficient point of interest, that would only be lessened by a competing one. The addition of the trees was made in order to give value to the grey of the house-side, which would have been considerably diminished by a broad expanse of sky. [Illustration: 58. A KENTISH FARMYARD _From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Arthur R. Moro._ Painted 1900.] Farmyards are out of fashion nowadays, and a Royal Water-Colour Society's Exhibition, which in the days of Prout and William Hunt probably contained a dozen of them, will now find place for a single example only from the hand of Mr. Wilmot Pilsbury, who alone faithfully records for us the range of straw-thatched buildings sheltering an array of picturesque waggons and obsolete farming implements. But this "stead" is just opposite to the farm in which Mrs. Allingham stays, and it has often attracted her on damp days by its looking like "a blaze of raw sienna." We can understand the tiled expanse of steep-pitched, moss-covered roof affording her some of that material on which her heart delights, and which she has felt it a duty to hand down to posterity before it gives place to some corrugated iron structure which must, ere long, supplant this old timber-built barn. What was originally a study has been transformed by her, through the human incidents, into a picture: the milkmaid carrying the laden pail from the byre; the cock on the dunghill, seemingly amazed that his wives are too busily engaged on its contents to admire him; the lily-white ducks waddling to the pool to indulge in a drink, the gusto of which seems to increase in proportion to the questionableness of its quality. CHAPTER VIII GARDENS AND ORCHARDS One is nearer God's heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth.