where had already bestirred
themselves, rising at this time of the year at the far less dreary hour
of absolute darkness. It had been above an hour earlier, before a
single bird had untucked his head, that twenty lights were struck in as
many bedrooms, twenty pairs of shutters opened, and twenty pairs of
eyes stretched to the sky to forecast the weather for the day.

Owls that had been catching mice in the out-houses, rabbits that had
been eating the wintergreens in the gardens, and stoats that had been
sucking the blood of the rabbits, discerning that their human neighbors
were on the move, discreetly withdrew from publicity, and were seen and
heard no more that day.

The daylight revealed the whole of Mr. Melbury's homestead, of which
the wagon-sheds had been an outlying erection. It formed three sides
of an open quadrangle, and consisted of all sorts of buildings, the
largest and central one being the dwelling itself. The fourth side of
the quadrangle was the public road.

It was a dwelling-house of respectable, roomy, almost dignified aspect;
which, taken with the fact that there were the remains of other such
buildings thereabout, indicated that Little Hintock had at some time or
other been of greater importance than now, as its old name of Hintock
St. Osmond also testified. The house was of no marked antiquity, yet
of well-advanced age; older than a stale novelty, but no canonized
antique; faded, not hoary; looking at you from the still distinct
middle-distance of the early Georgian time, and awakening on that
account the instincts of reminiscence more decidedly than the remoter
and far grander memorials which have to speak from the misty reaches of
mediaevalism. The faces, dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of
the great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to
gaze from those rectangular windows, and had stood under that
key-stoned doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards
of to-day. It was a house in whose reverberations queer old personal
tales were yet audible if properly listened for; and not, as with those
of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the possibility of echo.

The garden-front remained much as it had always been, and there was a
porch and entrance that way. But the principal house-door opened on
the square yard or quadrangle towards the road, formerly a regular
carriage entrance, though the middle of the area was now made use of
for stacking