Stossop Rectory lay, in its old-fashioned country grounds, inland from the sea about two miles on the south coast of Devon, and a very beautiful old place it was, long and low, containing many rooms, and having a deep gabled roof of Titian-red, that showed above the wealth of white and delicately pink roses that veiled its face; and if the Rectory from without looked the typical, peaceful English home, so within was it the really typical English home, full of disunion, pettiness, quarrelling, hatred and discontent. The English are perhaps of all humanity the greatest humbugs; they love, more than anything in the world, pretence; and the farther away the reality is from the sham they create out of their imagination the more dearly they love the sham; hence those amazing pictures of the domestic hearth, the happy, rosy-cheeked children, the smiling mother, the loving, protective father; the gentle temper, the sunny cheerfulness, the air of rest and peace and safety pervading all. Has anyone ever been the inmate of, or the visitor to, such a home? Let all who read these lines recall their recollections of home, their own and those they have seen. Whoever it was who wrote "Home, Sweet Home," one feels the author must have been an orphan and brought up at a school. The home in reality is the place where everyone feels they can display their bad temper and their bad manners, as they can wear their oldest, ugliest clothes and their surliest expressions. The heroic manly brothers of the story-book spend their time in pulling their sisters' hair and kicking them under the table; the gentle sisters hate them secretly in return; the father grumbles at his wife, the wife scolds the servants; and so the dreary round of home life goes on. The boys escape from it as soon as they can; the girls rebelliously long to follow; the unhappy wife and mother hopes vaguely for some relief that never comes; the father cherishes in his heart the memory of his last visit to town, _on business_, and looks forward eagerly to the next, enlivening the dull and stupid time that intervenes by bullying his wife. Such is the average home, and such was it at Stossop Rectory, and, but for the enchanted garden, Regina Marlow, the Rector's youngest daughter, who was of totally different stamp and mould from the rest of the family, could never have supported life in it at all.