So much entertainment did I find at that spot, so grateful did it seem in its openness after long confinement in the lower thickly wooded country, that I practically spent the day there.  At all events the best time for walking was gone when I quitted it, and then I could think of no better plan than to climb down into the old long untrodden road, or channel, again just to see where it would lead me.  After all, I said, my time is my own, and to abandon the old way I have walked in so long without discovering the end would be a mistake.  So I went on in it once more, and in about twenty minutes it came to an end before a group of old farm buildings in a hollow in the woods.  The space occupied by the buildings was quite walled round and shut in by a dense growth of trees and bushes; and there was no soul there and no domestic animal.  The place had apparently been vacant many years, and the buildings were in a ruinous condition, with the roofs falling in.

Now when I look back on that walk I blame myself for having gone on my way without trying to find out something of the history of that forsaken home to which the lonely old road had led me.  Those ruinous buildings once inhabited, so wrapped round and hidden away by trees, have now a strange look in memory as if they had a story to tell, as if something intelligent had looked from the vacant windows as I stood staring at them and had said, We have waited these many years for you to come and listen to our story and you are come at last.

Something perhaps stirred in me in response to that greeting and message, but I failed to understand it, and after standing there awhile, oppressed by a sense of loneliness, I turned aside, and creeping and pushing through a mass and tangle of vegetation went on my way towards the coast.

Possibly that idea or fancy of a story to tell, a human tragedy, came to me only because of another singular experience I had that day when the afternoon sun had grown oppressively hot—­another mystery of a desolate but not in this case uninhabited house.  The two places somehow became associated together in my mind.

The place was a little farm-house standing some distance from the road, in a lonely spot out of sight of any other habitation, and I thought I would call and ask for a glass of milk, thinking that if things had a promising look on my arrival my modest glass of milk would perhaps expand to a sumptuous five-o’clock tea and my short rest to a long and pleasant one.

The house I found on coming nearer was small and mean-looking and very old; the farm buildings in a dilapidated condition, the thatch rotten and riddled with holes in which many starlings and sparrows had their nests.  Gates and fences were broken down, and the ground was everywhere overgrown with weeds and encumbered with old broken and rusty implements, and littered with rubbish.  No person could I see about the place, but knew it was inhabited as there were some fowls walking about,