Tom Merivale's cottage, which had begun life as two cottages, stood very solitary some mile or two outside Brockenhurst, and though the high road passed within a few hundred yards of it, it was impossible to conceive a place that more partook of the essential nature of a hermitage. Between it and the high road lay a field, with only a rough track across it; beyond that, and nearer to the house, an orchard, while a huge box-hedge, compact and homogeneous with the growth and careful clipping of many years, was to any who wished to be shut off from the outer world a bar as impenetrable as a ring of fire. Immediately beyond this stood the cottage itself, looking away from the road; in front a strip of garden led down to the little river Fawn, and across the river lay a great open expanse of heath, through which, like a wedge, came down a big triangular wood of beech-trees. It was this way, over the garden and the open forest, that the cottage looked; not a house of any kind was in sight, and one might watch, like a ship-wrecked mariner for a sail, for any sign of human life, and yet in a long summer day perhaps the watcher would see nothing to tell him that he was not alone as far as humankind went in this woodland world. Tom had built out a long deep verandah that ran the whole length of the cottage on the garden front; brick pillars at the two corners supported a wooden roof, and a couple of steps led down into the garden. Down the centre of that ran a pergola, over which climbed in tangled luxuriance the long-limbed tribes of climbing roses. Ramblers spilt their crimson clusters over it, or lay in streaks and balls of white and yellow foam, while carmine pillar seemed to struggle in their embrace, and honeysuckle cast loving tendrils round them both and kissed them promiscuously. And though a gardener might have deplored this untended riot of vegetation, yet even the most orderly of his fraternity could not have failed to admire. Nature and this fruitful soil and the warm, soft air to which frost was a stranger, had taken matters into their own hands, and the result, though as fortuitous apparently as the splashed glories of a sunset, had yet a sunset's lavishness and generosity of colour. On each side of this pergola lay a small lawn of well-tended turf, and a shrubbery on one side of lilacs and syringa and on the other a tall brick wall with a deep garden bed below it gave a fragrant frame to the whole. The Hermit's avowal, indeed, that for the last year he had done nothing except carpentering and gardening implied a good deal of the latter, for the turf, as has been stated, was beautifully rolled and cut, and the beds showed evidence of seed-time and weeding, and had that indefinable but unmistakable air of being zealously cared for. But since such operations were concerned with plants, no principle was broken.