The village of Old Beech, which has been often named in this story as the living of George Juxon, was a retired and picturesque place, containing about three hundred inhabitants. Here, as at Cheddar, there was no lord of the manor in residence. The principal owner of the village lands for the last twenty years had been a Roman Catholic gentleman, who, being single, and of a severe and gloomy temper of mind, had, before this accession of property, embraced the monastic life in Italy, and taken the vows as a brother of the Carthusian order. The lessee of his estates had let them advantageously to four substantial farmers; one of whom occupied the venerable old manor-house. Its quaint wooden gables and ornamental carpentry always arrested the attention of the passer by their venerable appearance. A bay window, with five lights in two divisions, marked very distinctly the situation of the great hall; a noble apartment used only by the tenant as a vast store-room for the produce of his orchard and his garden. The broad gates hung broken and decaying from the square stone columns in which their hinges had been fastened by iron staples, and the pavement of the court was half hid by rank weeds. The church was small and ancient, and stood, not far from the manor-house, on a gentle eminence, which commanded a beautiful flat of meadow-land, watered by a small clear river that meandered through the fields in fine and graceful curves, was richly fringed with willows, and turned in its course two clean-looking busy mills. Not far from the churchyard stood a tall and stately beech-tree, about two centuries old, and near it the stump of the very tree from which the village had been first named was still visible. The smooth bark of this noble old beech was covered with initial letters, true love knots, and joined hearts, rudely carved by rustic hands, many of which, it might be seen by the dates affixed, had long since mouldered under the grassy heaps, to which lowly beds of peace the very same bell still tolled the parting summons of their lineal descendants.