In the first place, I found that many of these much vaunted farmhouses were situated in districts utterly destitute of beauty, and even desolate.  One specimen may stand for the whole.  I omit the particulars of the advertisement, which was drawn up in the usual style; but I must say, in justice to its author, that when I interviewed him in his city office he did what he could to discourage too abundant hope.  He did not go the length of admitting his description false, but he told me drily that ’I had better see the thing for myself.’  An hour’s journey found me on the Essex flats.  There was a bright sky and a brisk wind, but nothing could disguise the featureless monotony of the far-stretched landscape.  The train put me down at a roadside station where a dogcart waited my arrival.  I drove through a small village of mean, red-brick houses, and soon found myself in the open country.  My driver made but one remark during the four-mile journey.

‘You be come to see Dawes’ farm?’ he said.

I admitted the fact.

‘There’s a-many has come,’ he replied.  ’You be the twenty-first I have drove.  An’ they all be uncommon glad to get away agen.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘You’ll soon find out.’

With that he lit his pipe and smoked stolidly.  I was not long in comprehending the reason of his reticence.  Dawes’ farm may once have been a comfortable residence, but when I saw it it was a mildewed, rat-haunted ruin.  It stood upon a piece of redeemed marsh-land, and the salt damp of the marsh had eaten into its very vitals.  The wainscots were discoloured, the walls oozed, and part of the roof was broken.  There had once been a garden; that, like the rest, was a ruin.  The land was there no doubt, fifty acres said the advertisement, but it was treeless, bleak, flat, covered with coarse grass, and cut up by muddy watercourses.  To have lived in the house at all it must have been rebuilt, and even then nothing could have made it a cheerful place of residence.  There was no water-supply that I could discover, unless half a dozen butts that took the drippings of the roof represented it.  The orchard had long ago gone back to barbarism.  It appeared that the place had been deserted for half a dozen years.  I did not wonder.  The only wonder was that it had ever been inhabited.

‘Ah,’ repeated my driver, ‘there’s a-many as comes an’ looks, an’ they all be uncommon glad to get away agen.’

I subscribed to the common sentiment.  Never did that infinite diapason which we call the roar of London sound so sweet, never did those long, lighted, busy streets seem so habitable, as on that night when I returned from my casual inspection of Dawes’ farm.