It stood on the very edge of the town; wheatfields in the summer billowed up to its fences, and corn-stacks in the autumn camped around it like a besieging army.

The plank sidewalk finished there; after that you took the road or, if you were so inclined, the river, into which you could throw a stone from the orchard of the Plummer Place.

The house stood roomily and shadily in ornamental grounds, with a lawn in front of it and a shrubbery at each side, an orchard behind, and a vegetable garden, the whole intersected by winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full.

In the middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea.

There was also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a lane to the street.