Melbury's homestead, of
which the wagon-sheds had been an outlying erection. It formed
three sides of an open quadrangle, and consisted of all sorts of
buildings, the largest and central one being the dwelling itself.
The fourth side of the quadrangle was the public road.
It was a dwelling-house of respectable, roomy, almost dignified
aspect; which, taken with the fact that there were the remains of
other such buildings thereabout, indicated that Little Hintock had
at some time or other been of greater importance than now, as its
old name of Hintock St. Osmond also testified. The house was of
no marked antiquity, yet of well-advanced age; older than a stale
novelty, but no canonized antique; faded, not hoary; looking at
you from the still distinct middle-distance of the early Georgian
time, and awakening on that account the instincts of reminiscence
more decidedly than the remoter and far grander memorials which
have to speak from the misty reaches of mediaevalism. The faces,
dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of the great-great-
grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to gaze from
those rectangular windows, and had stood under that key-stoned
doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards of to-
day.
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