"I FEEL I shall love the place if only you love it too,"
wrote my father. "I do love the Property," replied
my mother. "If I complain of anything it is of
isolation and inhumanity. But the very look of our home-
stead does away with much of that." She loved tilled
fields better than any other form of landscape; and at
Greatham the tracts of bracken, the common-land, and
water-meadows flooded in winter, prevented our land-
scape from being purely agricultural. But no sooner had
she discovered pasture and tillage on our very border than
the objection vanished.

The eighty acres, as they came to be known, gave gar-
den, orchard, field and wood, besides what was common-
land and marsh. A small seventeenth-century farm-house
and an old cottage were at opposite ends of the land. Of
this piece of country Hilaire Belloc wrote in The Four
Men: "At this place the flat water-meadows, the same
that are flooded and turned to a lake in mid-winter, stretch
out to a sort of scene or stage, whereupon can be planted
the grandeur of the Downs. . . . This is the foreground
of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so made
that when one sees it one knows at once that here is a

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