Never was such a
comfortable, friendly dwelling-place devised as this hall; I feel
already as if half my life had been passed in it.
Out-of-doors, looking beyond the flower-garden, lawn, back yards,
pigeon-houses, and kitchen-gardens, we are surrounded by a
network of smooth grazing-fields, each shut off from the other by
its neat hedgerow and its sturdy gate. Beyond the fields the
hills seem to flow away gently from us into the far blue
distance, till they are lost in the bright softness of the sky.
At one point, which we can see from our bedroom windows, they dip
suddenly into the plain, and show, over the rich marshy flat, a
strip of distant sea--a strip sometimes blue, sometimes gray;
sometimes, when the sun sets, a streak of fire; sometimes, on
showery days, a flash of silver light.
The inhabitants of the farmhouse have one great and rare
merit--they are people whom you can make friends with at once.
Between not knowing them at all, and knowing them well enough to
shake hands at first sight, there is no ceremonious interval or
formal gradation whatever. They received us, on our arrival,
exactly as if we were old friends returned from some long
traveling expedition. Before we had been ten minutes in the hall,
William had the easiest chair and the snuggest corner; the
children were eating bread-and-jam on the window-seat; and I was
talking to the farmer's wife, with the cat on my lap, of the time
when Emily had the measles.
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