Thornycroft House must have belonged to a country gentleman once upon a time, or to more than one; men who built on a bit here and there once in a hundred years, until finally we have this charmingly irregular and dilapidated whole.  You go up three steps into Mrs. Heaven’s room, down two into mine, while Phoebe’s is up in a sort of turret with long, narrow lattices opening into the creepers.  There are crooked little stair-cases, passages that branch off into other passages and lead nowhere in particular; I can’t think of a better house in which to play hide and seek on a wet day.  In front, what was once, doubtless, a green, is cut up into greens; to wit, a vegetable garden, where the onions, turnips, and potatoes grow cosily up to the very door-sill; the utilitarian aspect of it all being varied by some scarlet-runners and a scattering of poppies on either side of the path.

The Belgian hares have their habitation in a corner fifty feet distant; one large enclosure for poultry lies just outside the sweetbrier hedge; the others, with all the houses and coops, are in the meadow at the back, where also our tumbler pigeons are kept.

Phoebe attends to the poultry; it is her department.  Mr. Heaven has neither the force nor the finesse required, and the gentle reader who thinks these qualities unneeded in so humble a calling has only to spend a few days at Thornycroft to be convinced.  Mrs. Heaven would be of use, but she is dressing the Square Baby in the morning and putting him to bed at night just at the hours when the feathered young things are undergoing the same operation.

A Goose Girl, like a poet, is sometimes born, sometimes otherwise.  I am of the born variety.  No training was necessary; I put my head on my pillow as a complicated product of modern civilisation on a Tuesday night, and on a Wednesday morning I awoke as a Goose Girl.

My destiny slumbered during the day, but at eight o’clock I heard a terrific squawking in the direction of the duck-ponds, and, aimlessly drifting in that direction, I came upon Phoebe trying to induce ducks and drakes, geese and ganders, to retire for the night.  They have to be driven into enclosures behind fences of wire netting, fastened into little rat-proof boxes, or shut into separate coops, so as to be safe from their natural enemies, the rats and foxes; which, obeying, I suppose, the law of supply and demand, abound in this neighbourhood.  The old ganders are allowed their liberty, being of such age, discretion, sagacity, and pugnacity that they can be trusted to fight their own battles.

The intelligence of hens, though modest, is of such an order that it prompts them to go to bed at a virtuous hour of their own accord; but ducks and geese have to be materially assisted, or I believe they would roam till morning.  Never did small boy detest and resist being carried off to his nursery as these dullards, young and old, detest and resist being driven to theirs.  Whether they suffer from insomnia, or nightmare, or whether they simply prefer the sweet air of liberty (and death) to the odour of captivity and the coop, I have no means of knowing.