An Arcadian Courtship by J.S. Fletcher — Read

Sweetbriar Farm, when I went to visit my cousin there, seemed to me a crystallization of all the storied sweets of Arcadia as one reads of them in the poets and the dreamers. The house itself was some five hundred years old; it had diamond-paned windows framed in ivy; on one side, where there was no ivy, the grey walls were covered with clematis and honeysuckle and jessamine. There was a walled garden, gay with blossom; there was an orchard, where the blossom fell on lush grass in which golden daffodils sprang up. At the end of the orchard ran a stream, brown and mysterious, in whose deeper pools lurked speckled trout. All about the house and the garden and the orchard the birds sang, for the nesting and breeding season was scarce over, and at night, in a coppice close by, a nightingale sang its heart out to the rising moon.

Within the old farmstead everything was as Arcadian as without. The sitting-room -- otherwise the best parlour -- was a dream of old oak, old china, old pewter, and old pictures. It smelt always of roses and lavender -- you could smoke the strongest tobacco there without offence, for the flower-scent was more powerful. A dream, too, was my sleeping-chamber, with lavender-kept linen, its quaint chintz hangings, and its deep window-seat, in which one could sit of a night to see the moonlight play upon garden and orchard, or of an early morning to watch the dew-starred lawn sparkle in the fresh sunlight. And, once free of the house, there was the great kitchen to admire, with its mighty hearth, its old brass and pewter, its ancient grandfather clock, its flitches and hams hanging, side by side with bundles of dried herbs, from the oaken rafters; and beyond it the dairy, a cool and shadowy place where golden butter was made out of snow-white cream; and beyond that, again, the deep, dungeon-like cellar where stood the giant casks of home-brewed ale -- nectar fit for the gods.