E-text prepared by Jon Ingram, David Cavanagh,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
TO: My Friends at Buckingham.
Nearly twenty years have gone since first we met, dear friends; time hasbut strengthened our early affections, so for love token, for sign ofthe years, I bring you this book—these views of your beautiful houseand hills where I have spent so many happy days, these last perhaps thehappiest of all.
G. M.
Three hundred yards of smooth, broad, white road leading from Henfield,a small town in Sussex. The grasses are lush, and the hedges are talland luxuriant. Restless boys scramble to and fro, quiet nursemaidsloiter, and a vagrant has sat down to rest though the bank is drippingwith autumn rain. How fair a prospect of southern England! Land ofexquisite homeliness and order; land of town that is country, of countrythat is town; land of a hundred classes all deftly interwoven and allwaxing to one class—England. Land encrowned with the gifts of peacefuldays—days that live in thy face and the faces of thy children.
See it. The outlying villas with their porches and laurels, the redtiled farm houses, and the brown barns, clustering beneath the wings ofbeautiful trees—elm trees; see the flat plots of ground of the marketgardens, with figures bending over baskets of roots; see the factorychimney; there are trees and gables everywhere; see the end of theterrace, the gleam of glass, the flower vase, the flitting white of thetennis players; see the long fields with the long team ploughing, seethe parish church, see the embowering woods, see the squire's house, seeeverything and love it, for everything here is England.
Three hundred yards of smooth, broad, white road, leading from Henfield,a small town in Sussex. It disappears in the woods which lean across thefields towards the downs. The great bluff heights can be seen, and atthe point where the roads cross, where the tall trunks are listed withgolden light, stands a large wooden gate and a small box-like lodge. Alonely place in a densely-populated county. The gatekeeper is blind, andhis flute sounds doleful and strange, and the leaves are falling.
The private road is short and stony. Apparently space was found for itwith difficulty, and it got wedged between an enormous holly hedge and astiff wooden paling. But overhead the great branches fight upwardsthrough a tortuous growth to the sky, and, as you advance, Thornby Placecontinues to puzzle you with its medley of curious and contradictorya