One cottage near the lich-gate of the churchyard had served to challenge particular attention. The building was of stone, but little of the fabric save one chimney-stack appeared, for on the south side a huge ivy-tod overwhelmed all with shining green; to the north a cotoneaster of uncommon proportions wrapped the house in a close embrace, covered the walls and spread over the roof also. Its dense, stiff sprays of dark foliage were laden with crimson berries; they hung brilliantly over the white face of the cottage and made heavy brows for the door and windows. A leafless lilac stuck up pale branches on one side of the entrance; stacks of dry fern stood on the other; and these hues were carried to earth and echoed in higher notes by some buff Orpington fowls upon the roadway, and a red setter asleep at the cottage door. Over all this genial and spirited colour profound silence reigned; and then the mystery of the deserted village was solved by sudden drone of organ music from the church. It happened to be Sunday, and most of those not engaged at kitchen fires were attending service. At last, however, a human being appeared and a man came out from the cottage of cotoneasters with a metal pail in his hand. He wore Sunday black but had not yet donned his coat, and his shirt-sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. His fore-arms were somewhat slight, but hard and brown; and his face had charmed any student of faces by its obvious kindness of heart and innate merriment of disposition. Bartley Crocker was thin and tall. He stood about six feet, yet weighed not quite eleven stone. He was, however, tough and very energetic where it pleased him so to be. Small black whiskers clung beneath his ears, while the rest of his face was shorn. His upper lip was short, his mouth full and rather feeble, his colour clear and pale. His eyes were small, somewhat sly, and the home of laughter. He was five-and-twenty and lived with a widowed mother and a maiden aunt under the berried roof of the cottage. The Crockers kept cows and poultry, and Bartley was a good son to his mother, though not a good friend to himself. He had a mind, quick but not deep, and his feelings were keen but transitory. He belonged to the order of Esau, won wide friendship, yet woke a measure of impatience among reflecting people, in that he spent his time to such poor purpose and wasted an unusually good education and a splendid native gift of nervous energy on the sports of the field. He had, in fact, become a man without putting away childish things--an achievement as rare among rustics as it is common under conditions of university education. Yet nobody but his mother ever blamed him to his face, and the tone of her voice always robbed her reproaches of the least forceful quality. She was proud of him; she knew that the men could not quarrel with him and that the girls were all his friends.