In those days Abercorran House stood at the end of a short, quiet street which had only six houses in it, all on the right-hand side going up, all roomy and respectable, monuments of Albert the Good’s age, well covered with creepers, screened by a continuous line of lime-trees and in most cases by laurel, lilac, and balsam in compact shrubberies. Opposite the houses a high wall ran along until, at Abercorran House, the street was cut short by an oak fence. Behind that fence, and occupying as much ground as all the other houses and gardens together, lay the Abercorran garden, the Wilderness, which was bounded and given its triangular shape by a main road--now Harrington Road--and a farm lane. Impenetrable hedges and unscaleable fences protected the garden from the world. I cannot say how it had come about that these three acres became attached to the house which so well deserved them. From the outside nobody would have suspected it. Abercorran House was in no practical respect superior to its neighbours; presumably the land beyond the fence was another property, or it would not have been allowed to cut short the street. But so it was. You entered the carriage gate on your right--there was no carriage--passed round the right side of the house into the yard at the back, turned to the left across it and went between the conservatory and the pigeon house out into the Wilderness. The house was distinguished, to the casual eye, by the lack of coloured or white curtains, the never-shut gate, the flourishing, untended lilac hiding the front door and lower windows except in winter. But for me it is hard to admit that Abercorran House had anything in common, except building material, with the other five--The Elms, Orchard Lea, Brockenhurst, and Candelent Gate, and I forget the other. The street was called Candelent Street; God knows why, but there may be someone who knows as much about Candelent Gate as I do of Abercorran House.