Two Secrets, and, a Man of his Word by Hesba Stretton

IF you take a railway map of England and Wales, you will see that, in spite of its close network of railroads, meeting and crossing in all directions, there are still many tracts of country where the villages must be several miles from any station. In these out-of-the-way spots life is more at a standstill now than even in the days when stage-coaches and wagons were wont to run from town to town, taking the villages in their route, and carrying with them the common gossip of a whole neighbourhood. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, before the railway system was as fully developed as it is at present, but when it had already given a death-blow to the old coaching business, many a village was cut off thus from its former intercourse with the outer world, and left to live apart from the common life of the nation, or to find its own way to a reunion.

In such a remote place, on the borderland which is half English and half Welsh, lived Christmas Williams. The village was scarcely more than a hamlet, having no pretension to a village street, its scattered cottages standing alone in their own gardens. A brown, shallow, brawling little river, which filled the quiet air with its singing, ran along under the churchyard walls, over which the tall lime-trees threw their deep shadows on the busy stream. West of the churchyard, still on the bank of the river, lay Christmas Williams' garden: his special, favourite garden, not the common piece of ground beside his house open to every foot, but his own locked up, fenced-in plot, reached by a footpath across his orchard.