Perhaps it is a defect at Allington that the farmyard is very close to the house.

But the stables, and the straw-yards, and the unwashed carts, and the lazy lingering cattle of the homestead, are screened off by a row of chestnuts, which, when in its glory of flower, in the early days of May, no other row in England can surpass in beauty.

Had any one told Dale of Allington,--this Dale or any former Dale,--that his place wanted wood, he would have pointed with mingled pride and disdain to his belt of chestnuts.
Of the church itself I will say the fewest possible number of words.

It was a church such as there are, I think, thousands in England--low, incommodious, kept with difficulty in repair, too often pervious to the wet, and yet strangely picturesque, and correct too, according to great rules of architecture.

It was built with a nave and aisles, visibly in the form of a cross, though with its arms clipped down to the trunk, with a separate chancel, with a large square short tower, and with a bell-shaped spire, covered with lead and irregular in its proportions.