But outside the gardens no pretensions had been made to the grandeur of a domain.  The pastures round the house were but pretty fields, in which timber was abundant.  There was no deer-park at Allington; and though the Allington woods were well known, they formed no portion of a whole of which the house was a part.  They lay away, out of sight, a full mile from the back of the house; but not on that account of less avail for the fitting preservation of foxes.

And the house stood much too near the road for purposes of grandeur, had such purposes ever swelled the breast of any of the squires of Allington.  But I fancy that our ideas of rural grandeur have altered since many of our older country seats were built.  To be near the village, so as in some way to afford comfort, protection, and patronage, and perhaps also with some view to the pleasantness of neighbourhood for its own inmates, seemed to be the object of a gentleman when building his house in the old days.  A solitude in the centre of a wide park is now the only site that can be recognised as eligible.  No cottage must be seen, unless the cottage orne of the gardener.  The village, if it cannot be abolished, must be got out of sight.  The sound of the church bells is not desirable, and the road on which the profane vulgar travel by their own right must be at a distance.  When some old Dale of Allington built his house, he thought differently.  There stood the church and there the village, and, pleased with such vicinity, he sat himself down close to his God and to his tenants.

As you pass along the road from Guestwick into the village you see the church near to you on your left hand; but the house is hidden from the road.  As you approach the church, reaching the gate of it which is not above two hundred yards from the high road, you see the full front of the Great House.  Perhaps the best view of it is from the churchyard.  The lane leading up to the church ends in a gate, which is the entrance into Mr Dale’s place.  There is no lodge there, and the gate generally stands open,—­indeed, always does so, unless some need of cattle grazing within requires that it should be closed.  But there is an inner gate, leading from the home paddock through the gardens to the house, and another inner gate, some thirty yards farther on, which will take you into the farmyard.  Perhaps it is a defect at Allington that the farmyard is very close to the house.  But the stables, and the straw-yards, and the unwashed carts, and the lazy lingering cattle of the homestead, are screened off by a row of chestnuts, which, when in its glory of flower, in the early days of May, no other row in England can surpass in beauty.  Had any one told Dale of Allington,—­this Dale or any former Dale,—­that his place wanted wood, he would have pointed with mingled pride and disdain to his belt of chestnuts.