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Updated: June 25, 2025
Grammer's school, he found himself one summer in a little watering-place on the shores of an English lake as blue as a china plate, set amid ranges of high green hills, on which nestled pretty white or brown villas surrounded by gardens and parks. The water was a new element for Gordon.
One or two villas stood in their own grounds but were occupied, and one, evidently older was shut up. Perhaps because it was inaccessible, perhaps because it had a pleasant outlook across the bay to the island and tower at its western extremity, Katherine at once determined it was the very place to suit them, and made her way to the local house agent to see what could be done toward securing it.
Fréjus we were not to see now: that was for the dim future, after lunch; but we turned to the left off the main road, and ran on until we saw, bathed in pines, deliciously deluged and drowned in pines, the white glimmer of classic-looking villas. These meant Valescure, said the chauffeur; and the Grand Hotel not classic looking, but pretty in its terraced garden meant luncheon.
We are, to be sure, looking in all directions for suggestions, and it cannot help appearing wonderful to a thoughtful observer how many and varied these suggestions are. Our wealthy citizens are building châteaux in the style of Francis I or of somebody else, Venetian or Florentine palaces, Roman villas, Flemish guild-halls, Elizabethan half-timber houses.
The more wealthy people have suburban villas, the gardens of which are surrounded by a wall, and laid out in the Chinese style, with fish-ponds, containing gold and silver fish, bridges, pagoda-shaped summer-houses and chapels, beds of gay-coloured flowers, and dwarf fruit-trees. A large portion of the people profess the Buddhist religion.
Yes, sir, I know Mr. B. He lodges at No. 8, Morton Villas has done these three weeks or more; but you'll not find him there, sir, now. He went to town by the eleven o'clock train, and does not usually return until the half-past four train." The country friend had no time to lose in returning to the village, to ascertain the truth of this statement.
From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis. It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide over several square miles of country, but just where the church stands it is shady and pleasant.
It has of course a bull-ring, enviously closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane trees dropping round them in the still air.
See the bridge of the Val surrounded by its lovely landscape: on the right, Paris with its grand monuments, which rise through the fog, or sparkle in the sun; on the left, Meudon, with its villas, its woods, its vines, and its royal castle! The two work-women look from one window to the other with exclamations of delight.
The street itself, to be sure, is commonplace enough, and hot, dusty, and disagreeable; but if you look above it, or on either side, there are green hills descending abruptly down, and softened with woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and beyond the river is a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with shrubbery in some parts from top to bottom, but in other places presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a cascade of ivy and creeping plants.
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