I sentimentalised and moralised—­naturally; and naturally, too, I thought of Catherine.  Strange there should be that vein of hardness running through the entire female sex.

As the rain still continued this afternoon, I proposed to Mrs. Anderson she should show me the house.  The excellent creature, busy with the dairy, offered me Annie as her substitute.  We went from cellar to garret, and the child’s companionship and her ingenuous prattle successfully beguiled a couple of hours.  The house in reality consists of two houses placed at right angles to each other.  The older part, built between two and three hundred years ago, is inhabited by the Andersons themselves.  It consists of a long, low kitchen, with an enormous hearth-place, an oaken settle, smoke-browned rafters, and a bricked floor.

In the centre of the room is a massive but worm-eaten table, capable of seating twenty persons at least.  It was built up in the kitchen itself some two hundred years ago, since no earthly ingenuity could have coaxed it through the low windows or narrow door.

Two of these, latticed like those of my sitting room, with the door between them, face west; but long before the sun is down the wooded eminence opposite has intercepted all his beams.  Outside is also a garden, full of forget-me-not, daffodil, and other humble flowers.  Here Scot, the watch-dog, lies dreaming in his kennel, and beyond the gate the cocks and hens lay dolefully in the rain, or bunch themselves up, lumps of dirty feather, under the shelter of the wood shed.

Upstairs are three sleeping rooms, and the attics, with curious dormer windows, still higher.  We come down again to the first floor.  A long matted passage runs from one end of the house to the other.  It sinks half a step where the newer portion is joined on.  This part, containing in all four rooms, two here and two below, was built in July, 1793, as a rudely scratched tablet on the wall outside informs me.

I sit with Annie on the carved chest at the southern end of the passage.  The window behind us gives an extensive view of grey rain and grey sea.  But I prefer to look at the smiling, freckled face that speaks so eloquently of sunny days.  The wet, trailing fingers of the briar-rose climbing over the porch tap at the casement, the loose branch of the plane-tree creaks in the wind, the distant sea moans and murmurs; but I prefer to listen to my little friend’s artless and occasionally “h-less” English, as she tells me how the Andersons have always been tenants of Down End since her great-grandfather came to the county and added on the living-house to the farm-house for his young wife.

“July, 1793.”  The date takes my fancy.  I can see the Anderson of those days, large-boned, sinewy, stooping, with a red, fiery beard, like his present representative, stolid, laborious, contented, building his house here facing the coasts of France, nearly as ignorant of, and quite as indifferent to, the wild work going on over there in Paris town as little Annie herself can be.  King, Dictator, Emperor, King, Emperor, Commune, have come and gone, but the sturdy race of farmers sprung from great-grandfather Anderson still carry on the same way of life in the same identical spot.