A country town, quiet, simple, and dull, chiefly of old construction, but with a few new streets and scattered villas of modern flimsiness, a river flowing through it, dulled and stilled with the frost; trees visible in every direction, blocking up the horizon and making a background, though only with a confused anatomy of bare branches, to the red houses; not many people about the streets, and these cold, subdued, only brightening a little with the idea that if the frost “held” there might be skating to-morrow. On one side the High Street trended down a slight slope toward the river, on the other ran vaguely away into a delta of small streets, which, in their turn, led to the common, on the edge of which lay the new district of Farafield. All towns it is said have a tendency to stray and expand themselves toward the west, and this is what had happened here. The little new streets, roads, crescents, and places all strayed toward the setting sun. The best and biggest of these, and at the same time the furthest off of all, was the Terrace, a somewhat gloomy row of houses, facing toward the common, and commanding across the strip of garden which kept them in dignified seclusion from the road a full view of the broken expanse of gorse and heather over which the sunsets played, affording to these monotonous windows a daily spectacle far more splendid than any official pomp. There were but twelve of these houses, ambitiously built to look like one great “Elizabethan mansion.” Except one or two large old-fashioned substantial houses in the market-place, these were the largest and most pretentious dwellings in the town; the proud occupants considered the pile as a very fine specimen of modern domestic architecture, and its gentility was undoubted. It was the landlord’s desire that nobody who worked for his or her living should enter these sacred precincts. It is difficult to keep so noble a resolution in a country where so many occupations which are not conspicuous to the common eye live and grow; but still it was an exalted aim.