the road or, if you were so inclined, the river, into which you could throw a stone from the orchard of the Plummer Place.  The house stood roomily and shadily in ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full.  In the middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea.  There was also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a lane to the street.  The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and she hoped he had the money to live up to them.  The Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a succession of “girls” left on account of the milking, and the lane was useful as an approach to the backyard by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter.  It was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison often declared that she could put up with the grounds if it had stopped there.  It did not stop there.  Though I was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison in the kitchen, she had a drawing-room in which she might have received the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble mantelpiece.  She had an icehouse and a wine cellar, and a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune that not one of them was in order.  She had far too much, as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing family, and if the ceiling was not dropping in the drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library or the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah wanted reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop.  The barn was definitely outside the radius of possible amelioration—­it passed gradually, visibly, into decrepitude, and Mrs Murchison often wished she could afford to pull it down.

It may be realized that in spite of its air of being impossible to “overtake”—­I must, in this connection, continue to quote its mistress—­there was an attractiveness about the dwelling of the Murchisons the attractiveness of the large ideas upon which it had been built and designed, no doubt by one of those gentlefolk of reduced income who wander out to the colonies with a nebulous view to economy and occupation, to perish of the readjustment.  The case of such persons, when they arrive, is at once felt to be pathetic; there is a tacit local understanding that they have made a mistake.  They may be entitled to respect,