My enthusiasm rose as I drew nearer to it, There was a warm, homely compactness about it, as of a nest among the trees.  The forest turf came to the very gate; a young orchard of five hundred trees lay to the southward of the house, a green paddock to the northward; and, as my advertisement informed me, the entire price of this eligible freehold property was five hundred pounds!  Why, then, was its possessor so eager to be quit of it?  I walked round the house, went through its rooms, took the view from various windows, already treating it as mine, and it was long before I came upon the cause.  That cause was not its remoteness or its solitude; it was lack of water.  There was no well, and to have sunk a well would have been costly.  The only water-supply was the rain-water from the roofs.  Men can laugh at a good many deprivations, but deprivation of water is a serious business.  I found upon inquiry that the nearest spring was two miles away.  In time of drought—­and in this high district summer drought was normal—­it was this or nothing.  Water was then sold by the bucket, nor was it easy to find any one to fetch and carry for you.  I had no mind to condemn myself to drink the droppings of a roof for life, nor to perform my ablutions by the aid of a teacup and a saucer.  The place, for all its beauty, was plainly uninhabitable as the Sahara.  A camel might have lived there with content; it was no place for a family used to the delights of tubbing.  I had remarked in the owner of the house a certain elementary lack of linen; the cause was now explained.  I think his only method of attaining cleanliness must have been by what is called ‘the dry air process.’

This adventure lives in my memory, not only because it had delightful elements, but because it was the last of a long series, which might have been called more truthfully misadventures.  For an exhilarating month I scoured the neighbourhood of London, living in a happy fever of enterprise and hope, but without result.  July came, and my problem was still unsolved.  I had already given notice to terminate the tenancy of my house in London, and there seemed a fair prospect that September would find me homeless.  At my present height of good spirits I cannot say that even this prospect dismayed me.  If the worst came to the worst I meant to take to the road in one of those convenient vans much used by travelling hawkers.  I had long envied the extraordinary snugness of those itinerant habitations; to be a Dr. Marigold seemed the happiest of fates; rent free, and finally delivered from tax-collectors and their tribe, I might yet roam the world as a superior kind of vagrant.  I knew indeed a young friend of mine who had adopted this very life.  He sold tracts and Bibles upon village greens, and I promise you no mansion had a warmer glow of comfort than the interior of his yellow van when the lamp was lit at night for supper.  He has since found his way to a lonely missionary station in Peru; but he has often told me that he was never happier than when he played the part of pious gipsy on the village greens of England.  At a pinch I thought that I could do what he had done; it was a romantic trade, and a new Lavengro might be written on it.