THE OLDEN FARM 319 



We have but come into this grey stone palace, 

 echoing with the whisper of monks' feet, to buy a 

 pound of butter. Just beyond that old-world kitchen- 

 garden and grey stone wall with the wicket-gate, 

 the cow-yards and calf-houses, long empty of their 

 winter population, are being set in order for the 

 winter that is surely on its way. You may find 

 not a few such farm-houses in a day's walk, 

 mansions such as the idle rich would build only for 

 themselves to live in to-day, and from the proceeds 

 of a business fifty times as lucrative as this four- 

 hundred-acre farm. They are so unconsidered as 

 buildings that it would cost many thousands to 

 replace, that the farm lets or sells for just about the 

 same figure, whether it has one of these manor- 

 houses on it or a mere mean-dimensioned farm- 

 cottage. But they are an eloquent testimony to the 

 power there was in the old British agriculture to 

 support a generous life by comparison with which 

 much of our modern trade-fed existence is squalid 

 and petty. 



A wall or two of our farm-house is truly Tudor, 

 and may have belonged to some small monastery 

 secularised at the Reformation. The spirit of the 

 old architecture has been fairly conveyed to the 

 main structure, most of which is probably two hundred 

 years younger. The lords of the manor who lived 

 here lived just as truly by agriculture as the gentleman 

 farmers who insensibly succeeded them, drawing no 

 tribute, as do modern lords, from rubber and cotton 

 and the thousand arteries of oversea commerce. 

 This is the palace of a self-contained and self- 

 sufficient kingdom, and it is to be remarked that 



