Close to Truro there is a little village called St. Uny Trevise.  You have to leave the high-road to get to it.  Its grey church tower is a conspicuous landmark for several miles round, standing out above a small wood of wind-swept oaks, on the top of a long broad-backed down, lately converted into farm-land, and ploughed up.  About half a mile from this, going by strangely winding deep lanes, you reach the bottom of a wooded dell, very lonely and quiet, with a stream running at the bottom, that spreads out into marshes and rush-beds, with here and there a broad brown pool.  Crossing the little ford, for there is only a rude bridge for foot-passengers, and ascending the opposite hill, you find yourself at last, after going up the steep overhung road, at the gate of a somewhat larger house than usual in those desolations.

The gate-posts are stone, with granite balls at the top, and there is a short drive, which brings you to a square mottled front of brown stone, with two large projections, or small wings, on each side.

This is a small manor, known as Tredennis, anciently belonging to the Templeton family, whose pictures ornament the hall.  It had been used latterly merely as a farmhouse; but a local solicitor, desiring that a somewhat more profitable arrangement might be made respecting it, had the manor put up at the extremely moderate rent of L60, and banished the farmer to an adjoining tenement.

There was a terraced garden, very rich in flowers in the summer.  It faced south and west, commanding a view of a winding valley, very peaceful and still, a great part of which was overgrown with stunted oak copses, or divided into large sloping fields.  At the end, the water of a tidal creek—­Tressillian water—­caught the eye.  The only sounds that ever penetrated to the car were the cries of birds, or the sound of sheep-bells, or the lowing of cows, with an occasional halloo from the farm, children calling among the copses, or the shrill whistle from over the hills, telling of the train, that, burrowing among the downs, tied one to the noisier world.

Truro has been much opened up since then.  It has a bishop, and the rudiments of a cathedral.  It has burst into a local and spasmodic life.  But when I knew it through Arthur, it was the sleepiest and laziest town alive, with the water rippling through the streets.  Old-world farmers, with their strange nasal dialect, used to haunt the streets on market day, like the day on which we first drove through it on our way to Tredennis.  Arthur was well and serene.  He took the keenest delight in the fragrance of retirement that hung about the place:  people to whose minds and ears modern ideas, modern weariness, had never penetrated; who lived a serious indolent life, their one diversion the sermon and the prayer-meeting, their one dislike “London ways.”