Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
A quiet, sunny nook in the hollow it is, this square old garden with its gravelled walks and high stone walls; a sheltered retreat left peaceful here, under the overhanging woods, when the stream of the world’s traffic turned off into another channel. The grey stone house, separated from the garden by a thick privet hedge and moss-grown court, is the last dwelling at this end of the quiet market-town, and, with its slate roof and substantial double storey, is of a class greatly superior to its neighbours, whose warm red tiles are just visible over the walls. It stands where the old road to Edinburgh dipped to cross a little stream, and, in the bygone driving days, the stage-coach, after rattling out of the town, and down the steep road here, between the white, tile-roofed houses, when it crossed the bridge opposite the door, began to ascend through deep, embowering woods. But a more direct highway to the capital was opened many a year ago; just beyond the bridge a wall was built across the road; and the grey house with its garden was left secluded in the sunny hollow. The rapid crescendo of the coach-guard’s horn no longer wakens the echoes of the place, and the striking of the clock every hour in the town steeple is the only sound that reaches the spot from the outside world.
The hot sun beats on the garden here all day, from the hour in the morning when it gets above the grand old beeches of the wood, till it sets away beyond the steeple of the town. But in the hottest hours it is always refreshing to look over the weather-stained tiles of the long low toolhouse at the mossy green of the hill that rises there, cool and shaded, under the trees. Now and then a bull, of the herd that feeds in the glades of the wood, comes down that shaded bank, whisking his tawny sides with an angry tail to keep off the pestering flies, and his deep bellow reverberates in the hollow. In the early morning, too, before the dewy freshness has left the air, the sweet mellow pipe of the mavis, and the fuller notes of the blackbird, float across from these green depths, and ever and again throughout the day the clear whistle of some chaffinch comes from behind the leaves.