The Woodlanders

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and

presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like

a dead-born child. The villagers everywhere 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 timber, fagots, bundles, and other products of the wood.

It was divided from the lane by a lichen-coated wall, in which hung a

pair of gates, flanked by piers out of the perpendicular, with a round

white ball on the top of each.