Beyond the garden lay the orchard, now used as a tennis lawn, but still happily surrounded by trees, through whose boughs peeps of the sweet surrounding country can be seen. Indeed Alresford is entirely encircled by the country, and its three only streets—Broad Street, East Street, and West Street—lead straight into it. Miss Mitford, describing the views on either side of their grounds, says that to the south rose the “picturesque church with its yews and lindens, and beyond it a down as smooth as velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine and hawthorn”; while down in the valley “gleamed a bright, clear lakelet radiant with swans and water-lilies, which the simple townsfolk were content to call the ‘Great Pond.’” Dr. Mitford’s house must indeed have been a “pleasant home” for a child, with its garden and orchard for a playground behind the house, and, in front, its cheerful view of the village street with its ever-changing scenes of passing horsemen and carts, or of herds of sheep and cattle driven to market. Here Mary first learnt, though unconsciously, to enjoy the beauties of nature and to enter into the simple pleasures of village life. [Illustration] CHAPTER II HAPPY MEMORIES The market of old days used to be held in an open space where East Street and West Street meet, near to the Bell Inn, whose gilded sign, in the form of a bas-relief, is displayed over its entrance. Here we can fancy the little Mary being taken to see the gay booths with their display of toys or of ginger-bread, and the sheep or pigs in pens. Miss Mitford was warmly attached to the place of her birth, and often alludes to it, but usually under the pseudonym of “Cranley.” “One of the noisiest inhabitants,” she writes, “of the small, irregular town of Cranley, in which I had the honour to be born, was a certain cobbler by name Jacob Giles. He lived exactly over-right our house in a little appendage to the baker’s shop.... At his half-hatch might he be seen stitching and stitching, with the peculiar, regular two-handed jerk proper to the art of cobbling, from six in the morning to six at night.... There he sat with a dirty red night-cap over his grizzled hair, a dingy waistcoat and old blue coat, darned, patched and ragged, and a greasy leathern apron....