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Updated: July 24, 2025
It's a mystery to me how farmers have patience to work there." Annie opened her eyes. There was evidently more than one way of looking at a question. The farm-houses seemed very low and mean to her, as she looked at them from the window. There were no fences, excepting now and then the inhospitable barbed wire.
He said this in a tone of airy badinage which Mary seemed to appreciate; but he gravely wondered what he could do with her, and how he should replace her, if she fell seriously ill. For the last two days farm-houses and cultivated fields had been growing rarer and rarer, and the road rougher and wilder.
At such times it was the dear mother who spoke in me, and the father who resolutely carried out my decision. The boat drifted slowly with the flood-tide, and I, lying on the bottom, fell to thought of what the day had brought me. The setting sun touched the single spire of Christ Church, and lit up yellow squares of light in the westward-looking windows of the rare farm-houses on the Jersey shore.
On that same day Sir Thomas sent for his niece into his room, and there read to her the letter which he had received from the Squire's son. It was now the last week of October, that short blessed morsel of time which to the poor Squire at Newton was the happiest of his life. He was now cutting down trees and building farm-houses, and looking after his stud in all the glory of his success.
No one answered this speech, because they had just passed out of the forest and their attention was fixed upon the scene before them a beautiful vale in which were many fruit trees and green fields, with pretty farm-houses scattered here and there and broad, smooth roads that led in every direction.
It was in a quiet rural neighborhood, where the farm-houses were quaint and antiquated. A part only of the manor house remained, and was inhabited by a farmer. The Washington crest, in colored glass, was to be seen in a window of what was now the buttery. A window on which the whole family arms was emblazoned had been removed to the residence of the actual proprietor of the manor.
It needs to be softened with a good deal of wood. There were stone farm-houses, looking ancient, and able to last till twice as old. Instead of the hedges, so universal in other parts of England, there were stone fences of good height and painful construction, made of small stones, which I suppose have been picked up out of the fields through hundreds of years.
I was not surprised to find my men gone; with all his good-will to the cause, their host had not dared to entertain such suspicious strangers longer than twenty-four hours: keen eyes and ready tongues were rife all around, and we had proof already, in poor George Hoyle's case, how quickly and sternly the charge of "harboring disaffected persons" could be acted upon: he had sent the men to separate secluded farm-houses, whence they could be summoned at a few hours' warning.
There is no such thing in all Bohemia, I question whether there be in all Germany, as a park; and as to detached farm-houses, they are totally unknown. The nobility inhabit what they term schlosses, that is to say, castles or palaces, which are invariably planted down, either in the very heart of a town or large village, or at most, a gunshot removed from it.
And so, by fragments of an ancient terrace, and by some rugged outbuildings that had once been fortified, and passing under a ruined gateway we came to the old farm-house in the thick stone wall outside the old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers: which I looked at like a stupid savage, seeing no specially in, seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses to resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of all ruin that I knew, poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights, the cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond, and the fowls pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them might be killed for dinner while I stayed there; wondering whether the scrubbed dairy vessels, drying in the sunlight, could be goodly porringers out of which the master ate his belly-filling food, and which he polished when he had done, according to my ward experience; shrinkingly doubtful whether the shadows, passing over that airy height on the bright spring day, were not something in the nature of frowns, sordid, afraid, unadmiring, a small brute to shudder at.
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