my cheque the bribe.  Here said I, was present wealth, let us be content.  The plea was not received with instant favour, but it was not wholly ineffectual.  By the time we sat down to supper that night we had all attained to cheerfulness.  It was a meal of some tenuity, not calculated to lie heavy on the stomach; for, said Charlotte, ’If we have to begin high thinking and plain living, we can’t begin too early.’  The only load on my digestion that night was the Tombs of the Etruscans.

It says much for the steadfastness of our convictions, that in this new crisis of affairs the old resolution to seek a country life passed unquestioned.  What to another had seemed calamity appeared to us opportunity.  When the daily paper came next morning, it was not to the columns where commerce chronicles its wants that my eye turned, but to the much more engaging columns where lands and houses were advertised for sale.  This part of the newspaper had long ago attracted me by its fine air of surreptitious romance.  My mind had often been kept aglow for a whole day by some seductive advertisement of cottages ’situate amid pine-woods,’ or farmhouses, all complete, even to the styes and kennels, which by all accounts were to be given away.  One such advertisement I particularly remember for a kind of insane generosity which pervaded it.  It described at length a farmhouse, ’stone-built and covered with ivy’ (observe the very definite sense of the picturesque conveyed in this phrase), containing ten rooms, commanding pleasant views of a well-wooded country, together with a large orchard, and one hundred and fifty acres of freehold land, the whole of which might be purchased for 750 pounds; and, added the advertiser, ’the furniture at present in the house is included in the price.’  I do not know where this terrestrial Paradise existed; I believe it was in Essex; but I often regretted that I made no effort to discover it.

However, the morning paper, if it contained no paragraph comparable with this in point of style and seduction, certainly did appear singularly rich in Paradises.  Philanthropists, disguised as land-agents, contended eagerly with one another through many columns of advertisements, offering a reluctant world all the advantages of rural happiness on what appeared merely nominal terms.  It appeared that they did not even want the money, which they mentioned only in a kind of gentlemanly whisper; pay them but 100 pounds in sound cash, and the rest might stand at mortgage upon easy terms for an indefinite period!  One might have imagined that the whole of rural England was depopulated; that Eden itself had been cut up into building lots; that, in fact, the land-agent was subsidised by a paternal government to persuade the townsman to turn landed proprietor on terms which even the squatter in new lands would regard as generous.

The reality I soon found to be entirely different.  The moment I set about the deliberate business of finding a cottage I made a series of surprising discoveries which I will now relate.