After inspecting the lop-sided old cottages, with their deep
roomy chimneys, in which the farm labourer loved to sit of a night,
roasting his ponderous boots, and smoking the pipe of meditation, and their
impossible staircases, which seemed to have been designed with a deliberate
view to the breaking of legs and endangerment of spines, Mr. Granger made a
wry face, and ordered that rubbish to be swept away.
"You can build me half-a-dozen upon the new Arden design," he said; "red
brick, with stone dressings; and be sure you put a tablet with the date in
front of each."
He was thinking of his son, anxious that there should be some notable
improvement, some new building every year, to mark the progress of his
boy's existence.
The farm-labourers and their wives did not look so delighted as they might
have been by this edict. These benighted souls liked the old cottages,
lop-sided as they were--liked the crooked staircase squeezed into a corner
of the living room below, the stuffy little dens above, with casement
windows which only opened on one side, letting in the smallest modicum of
air, and were not often opened at all. Cottages on the Now Arden model
meant stone floors below and open rafters above, thorough draughts
everywhere, and, worst of all, they meant weekly inspection by Miss
Granger. The free sons and daughters of Hickly-on-the-Hill--this little
cluster of houses which formed a part of Mr.
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