Loveday's History by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

THE vicarage of Coombe Ashton is just beside the gray old church, so that its garden and orchard, and the churchyard run together without any divisions, save a bank overrun with sweetbrier and ivy. 'Tis a stone house of two floors and three or four gables, convenient and roomy enough, but plain and unornamented as any farmhouse. I shall never forget how forlorn and wretched it looked to my eyes the first time I entered its doors.

My husband had left his cure in the hands of Sir David Dean, a good and religious priest, but one as absentminded and indifferent to his own comfort as any man I ever saw. He had lived alone in the vicarage all these years without a housekeeper, save that an old woman, living in one of the alms-cottages by the church-gate, now and then came in and scratched about a bit like a hen in a straw-yard. Any one who knows what men are when left to themselves, may guess what condition matters were in after seven or eight years of such housekeeping. The rushes on the floor must have been at least three months old, and showed such a state of things when we swept them out, that Mary Thornton sat down on the doorstep and cried.