rounded by trees--and the woods here are very beautiful by
virtue of the great variety of the trees, beech, oak, chestnut and very
fine walnut, and of the fair growth and dignity of the individual
tree--amid a little circle of seven cottages which form Sir Thomas
Acland's almshouses. The cottages are old and whitewashed, and the
thatched roofs sink into beautiful curves and hollows where the shadows
lie smoothly; in the summer, when visitors from Minehead mostly see
them, the windows stand open to the warm air, and in the shade of the
porches, sweet-scented with climbing roses, they can be given tea by
the old pensioners.

It is beautiful indeed, and yet to me it has lost something of the
appeal of those lovely and desolate little villages--of Brendon, or
Parracombe, or Oare--more bleak and windswept, more sun-scorched and
barren, thrusting each into some cleft or hollow of the high brown
lands, with the wide sky over each, and each its small square church to
witness to the fear of God. Some quality of freedom and individuality
which is their charm is not in Selworthy.

This is a mere question of taste; we are all apt to look at a place
with the eye of extraneous opinion. The beauty of Selworthy is not,
indeed, except fancifully, affected by its being a landowner's village,
a swept-and-garnished village where the roofs are repaired by Sir
Thomas Acland's thatcher, for fear they should fall into the evil ways
of slate, and spoil the lovely contours of the village. A landlord has
as much right to preserve the beauty of his property as he has to the
upkeep of his fences, and we are indeed fortunate to live in an age
when the mellowed beauty of ancient buildings has become almost a
religion. But to me there is a smugness about such a village, which
has become the hobby, the by no means selfish or unenlightened hobby,
of a single man, which does much to temper my enjoyment. Selworthy,
with its thatch and cob, its neat old pensioners, its suavity, its
absence of what is unsightly, is an anomaly; it can only be preserved
against the growing pressure of the twentieth century by the artificial
barriers erected by wealth. Parracombe, smaller, lonelier, with its
white farms and outbuildings and cottages, is the natural outcome of a
small and scattered population, who are not rich enough to build newer
houses, and who live as their forefathers did because their isolation
on Exmoor, and the barren land on which they live, ha