The Mitfords had taken a cottage in Three Mile Cross—a small village about two miles from Graseley, which they supposed at first would be only a temporary abode, but which finally proved to be their home for many years. Here it was that Mary Russell Mitford, throwing herself into the life of her rustic surroundings, and recognizing its poetry and its beauty, conceived her plan of writing the tales of “Our Village.” These tales were destined to render little Three Mile Cross classic ground, and to attract pilgrims, even from the other side of the Atlantic, to visit the prototype of “Our Village.” Mary writes to Sir William Elford early in April, 1820:— “We have moved a mile nearer Reading—to a little village street situate on the turnpike road between Basingstoke and the aforesaid illustrious and quarrelsome borough. Our residence is a cottage—no not a cottage, it does not deserve the name—a messuage or tenement, such as a little farmer who had made twelve or fourteen hundred pounds might retire to when he left off business to live on his means. It consists of a series of closets ... which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries, some of them minus a corner which has been unnaturally filched for a chimney; others deficient in half a side which has been truncated by the shelving roof.... [But] we shall be greatly benefited by the compression—though at present the squeeze sits upon us as uneasily as tight stays, and is almost as awkward looking. “Nevertheless we are really getting very comfortable and falling into our old habits with all imaginable ease. Papa has already amused himself by committing a disorderly person, the pest of the Cross.... Mamma has converted an old dairy into a most commodious store-house. I have stuffed the rooms with books and the garden with flowers, and lost my only key. Lucy has made a score of new acquaintances, and picked up a few lovers; and the great white cat, after appearing exceedingly disconsolate and out of his wits for a day or two, has given full proof of resuming his old warlike and predatory habits by being lost all the morning in a large rat hole and stealing the milk for our tea this afternoon.” [Illustration: THE MITFORDS’ COTTAGE] Ten days later Mary writes to a female friend: “We are still at this cottage, which I like very much.... Indeed I had taken root completely till yesterday, when some neighbours of ours (pigs, madam) got into my little flower court and made havoc among my pinks and sweet-peas, and a little loosened the fibres of my affection. At the very same moment the pump was announced to be dry, which, considering how much water we consume—I and my flowers—is a sad affair.” But she adds a day or two afterwards: “I am all in love with our cottage again: the cherries are ripe, and the roses bloom, the water has come, and the pigs are gone!”