It was a bright cool afternoon about the middle of August, and we proceeded in high spirits towards our destination, talking, as, we went, of the excellence and agreeableness of our delightful friends, and anticipating the high intellectual pleasure, the gratification to the taste and the affections, which our renewed intercourse with persons so accomplished and so amiable, could not fail to afford; both agreeing that Hatherden was the very place we wanted, the very situation, the very distance, the very size.  In agreeing with me, however, my companion could not help reminding me rather maliciously how very much, in our late worthy neighbours, the Norrises’ time, I had been used to hate and shun this paragon of places; how frequently I had declared Hatherden too distant for a walk, and too near for a drive; how constantly I had complained of fatigue in mounting the hill, and of cold in crossing the common; and how, finally, my half yearly visits of civility had dwindled first into annual, then into biennial calls, and would doubtless have extended themselves into triennial marks of remembrance, if our neighbours had but remained long enough.  “To be sure,” added he, recollecting, probably, how he, with his stricter sense of politeness, used to stave off a call for a month together, taking shame to himself every evening for his neglect, retaining ’at once the conscience and the sin!’ “To be sure, Norris was a sad bore!  We shall find the hill easier to climb when the Camdens live on the top of it.”  An observation to which I assented most heartily.

On we went gaily; just pausing to admire Master Keep, the shoemaker’s farming, who having a bit of garden ground to spare, sowed it with wheat instead of planting it with potatoes, and is now, aided by his lame apprentice, very literally carrying his crop.  I fancy they mean to thrash their corn in the woodhouse, at least there they are depositing the sheaves.  The produce may amount to four bushels.  My companion, a better judge, says to three; and it has cost the new farmer two superb scarecrows, and gunpowder enough for a review, to keep off the sparrows.  Well, it has been amusement and variety, however! and gives him an interest in the agricultural corner of the county newspaper.  Master Keep is well to do in the world, and can afford himself such a diversion.  For my part, I like these little experiments, even if they be not over gainful.  They show enterprise:  a shoemaker of less genius would never have got beyond a crop of turnips.

On we went—­down the lane, over the bridge, up the hill—­for there really is a hill, and one of some steepness for Berkshire, and across the common, once so dreary, but now bright and glittering, under the double influence of an August sun, and our own good spirits, until we were stopped by the gate of the lawn, which was of course locked, and obliged to wait until a boy should summon the old woman who had charge of the house, and who was now at work in a neighbouring harvest-field, to give us entrance.