The Small House at Allington | Page 4

it to the front
door. The Dales of Allington had always been gardeners, and their
garden was perhaps more noted in the county than any other of their
properties. But outside the gardens no pretensions had been made to the
grandeur of a domain. The pastures round the house were but pretty
fields, in which timber was abundant. There was no deer-park at
Allington; and though the Allington woods were well known, they
formed no portion of a whole of which the house was a part. They lay
away, out of sight, a full mile from the back of the house; but not on
that account of less avail for the fitting preservation of foxes.
And the house stood much too near the road for purposes of grandeur,
had such purposes ever swelled the breast of any of the squires of
Allington. But I fancy that our ideas of rural grandeur have altered

since many of our older country seats were built. To be near the village,
so as in some way to afford comfort, protection, and patronage, and
perhaps also with some view to the pleasantness of neighbourhood for
its own inmates, seemed to be the object of a gentleman when building
his house in the old days. A solitude in the centre of a wide park is now
the only site that can be recognised as eligible. No cottage must be seen,
unless the cottage orne of the gardener. The village, if it cannot be
abolished, must be got out of sight. The sound of the church bells is not
desirable, and the road on which the profane vulgar travel by their own
right must be at a distance. When some old Dale of Allington built his
house, he thought differently. There stood the church and there the
village, and, pleased with such vicinity, he sat himself down close to
his God and to his tenants.
As you pass along the road from Guestwick into the village you see the
church near to you on your left hand; but the house is hidden from the
road. As you approach the church, reaching the gate of it which is not
above two hundred yards from the high road, you see the full front of
the Great House. Perhaps the best view of it is from the churchyard.
The lane leading up to the church ends in a gate, which is the entrance
into Mr Dale's place. There is no lodge there, and the gate generally
stands open--indeed, always does so, unless some need of cattle grazing
within requires that it should be closed. But there is an inner gate,
leading from the home paddock through the gardens to the house, and
another inner gate, some thirty yards farther on, which will take you
into the farmyard. Perhaps it is a defect at Allington that the farmyard
is very close to the house. But the stables, and the straw-yards, and the
unwashed carts, and the lazy lingering cattle of the homestead, are
screened off by a row of chestnuts, which, when in its glory of flower,
in the early days of May, no other row in England can surpass in beauty.
Had any one told Dale of Allington--this Dale or any former Dale--that
his place wanted wood, he would have pointed with mingled pride and
disdain to his belt of chestnuts.
Of the church itself I will say the fewest possible number of words. It
was a church such as there are, I think, thousands in England--low,
incommodious, kept with difficulty in repair, too often pervious to the

wet, and yet strangely picturesque, and correct too, according to great
rules of architecture. It was built with a nave and aisles, visibly in the
form of a cross, though with its arms clipped down to the trunk, with a
separate chancel, with a large square short tower, and with a
bell-shaped spire, covered with lead and irregular in its proportions.
Who does not know the low porch, the perpendicular Gothic window,
the flat-roofed aisles, and the noble old grey tower of such a church as
this? As regards its interior, it was dusty; it was blocked up with
high-backed ugly pews; the gallery in which the children sat at the end
of the church, and in which two ancient musicians blew their bassoons,
was all awry, and looked as though it would fall; the pulpit was an ugly
useless edifice, as high nearly as the roof would allow, and the
reading-desk under it hardly permitted the parson to keep his head free
from the dangling tassels of the cushion above him. A clerk also was
there beneath him, holding a third position somewhat elevated; and
upon the whole thing there were not quite as I would have had them.
But, nevertheless, the place