As she sat at that window Miss Mitford would jot down all the incidents that occurred in the village street below. “It is a pleasant, lively scene this May morning,” she writes, “with the sun shining so gaily on the irregular rustic dwellings, intermixed with their pretty gardens; a cart and a waggon watering (it would be more correct perhaps to say _beering_) at the ‘Rose’; Dame Wheeler with her basket and her brown loaf just coming from the bakehouse; the nymph of the shoe shop feeding a large family of goslings at the open door; two or three women in high gossip dawdling up the street; Charles North the gardener, with his blue apron and a ladder on his shoulder, walking rapidly by; a cow and a donkey browsing the grass by the wayside; my white greyhound, Mayflower, sitting majestically in front of her own stable; and ducks, chickens, pigs and children scattered over all.... Ah! here is the post cart coming up the road at its most respectable rumble, that cart, or rather caravan, which so much resembles a house upon wheels, or a show of the smaller kind at a country fair. It is now crammed full of passengers, the driver just protruding his head and hands out of the vehicle, and the sharp, clever boy, who, in the occasional absence of his father, officiates as deputy, perched like a monkey on the roof.” “I have got exceedingly fond of this little place,” writes Mary to Sir William Elford; “could be content to live and die here. To be sure the rooms are of the smallest; I, in our little parlour, look something like a blackbird in a goldfinch’s cage—but it is so snug and comfortable.” The projecting piece of building seen in the sketch in the front of the cottage was appropriated by the doctor as his dispensary. It has a door that opens into the little front court. The bedrooms are on the first floor. Mary’s study window commands a pretty view beyond the low peaked roofs of the shoemaker’s shop and of its neighbouring cottages. At the foot of a grassy slope can be seen a dark line of tree tops. They form part of a magnificent avenue of elms that border a long stretch of grass—one of the old drover’s roads—extending for nearly two miles. “The effect of these tall solemn trees,” remarks Mary, “so equal in height, so unbroken and so continuous, is quite grand and imposing as twilight comes on, especially when some slight bend in the lane gives to the outline almost the look of an amphitheatre.” This spot—Woodcock Lane as it is called—was a favourite resort of Mary’s, and thither she often repaired when composing her country sketches. “In that very lane,” she writes one day, “am I writing on this sultry June day, luxuriating in the shade, the verdure, the fragrance of hayfield and beanfield, and the absence of all noise except the song of birds and that strange mingling of many sounds, the whir of a thousand forms of insect life, so often heard among the general hush of a summer noon.