ings as there were adorned the landscape instead of defacing
it.

Hampshire, in the district about the village of Steventon,
had, standing back among timbered meadows, houses of
many ages, from the Elizabethan half-manor, half-farm-
house of rosy, saffron brick, nestling in the shelter of its
hill, to the gentleman's seat, a classical stone erection with
concealed roof and stone-garlanded, pillared front, planned
with an eye to views and crowning a gentle, tree-covered
slope. Of the soil itself, Gilbert White said that it was com-
posed of: "a kind of white land, neither chalk nor clay,
neither fit for pasture nor for the plough.""This white
soil," he added, "produces the brightest hops."

The village of Steventon itself was little more than a row
of cottages, the important families of the neighborhood
living at some distance on their various estates. The Rectory
stood on one side of a lane, which had the breadth of a good
road, but the weak places in whose unpaved surface were
filled up by a man with some shovelfuls of stones whenever
an unusual amount of company was expected at the houses
beyond it. On one side of the lane stood a spacious barn, on
the other, surrounded by meadows sprinkled with elm and
chestnut trees, was the Rectory, a house with a flat façade
and narrow roof, square sashed windows and a trellised
porch; the ground in front had a wide, curving drive and to
the right of it a plantation of elm, chestnut and fir. At the
back, a bow window looked out onto a garden where an
alley of turf, bordered by strawberry beds, ended in a sun-
dial; a terrace of turf, shaded by elm trees, ran between the
garden and the open meadows, and led to a copse, visible
from the house's upper windows.

The bow window belonged to the Rector's study. The
Reverend George Austen was a very handsome man with

-6-