CHAPTER III.
July 8th.
Thornycroft is by way of being a small poultry farm.
In reaching it from Barbury Green, you take the first left-hand road, go till you drop, and there you are.
It reminds me of my "grandmother's farm at Older." Did you know the song when you were a child ?-- My grandmother had a very fine farm 'Way down in the fields of Older.
With a cluck-cluck here, And a cluck-cluck there, Here and there a cluck-cluck, Cluck-cluck here and there, Down in the fields at Older.
It goes on for ever by the simple subterfuge of changing a few words in each verse.
My grandmother had a very fine farm 'Way down in the fields of Older.
With a quack-quack here, And a quack-quack there, Here and there a quack-quack, Quack-quack here and there, Down in the fields at Older.
This is followed by the gobble-gobble, moo-moo, baa-baa, etc., as long as the laureate's imagination and the infant's breath hold good.

The tune is pretty, and I do not know, or did not, when I was young, a more fascinating lyric.
{The sitting hens: p17.jpg} Thornycroft House must have belonged to a country gentleman once upon a time, or to more than one; men who built on a bit here and there once in a hundred years, until finally we have this charmingly irregular and dilapidated whole.

You go up three steps into Mrs.Heaven's room, down two into mine, while Phoebe's is up in a sort of turret with long, narrow lattices opening into the creepers.

There are crooked little stair-cases, passages that branch off into other passages and lead nowhere in particular; I can't think of a better house in which to play hide and seek on a wet day.

In front, what was once, doubtless, a green, is cut up into greens; to wit, a vegetable garden, where the onions, turnips, and potatoes grow cosily up to the very door-sill; the utilitarian aspect of it all being varied by some scarlet-runners and a scattering of poppies on either side of the path.
The Belgian hares have their habitation in a corner fifty feet distant; one large enclosure for poultry lies just outside the sweetbrier hedge; the others, with all the houses and coops, are in the meadow at the back, where also our tumbler pigeons are kept.
Phoebe attends to the poultry; it is her department.