These Square
Red Brick Boxes With Sloping Slate Tops Are Built As Close As
Possible To The Public Road, So
That the passer-by looking in
at the windows may see the whole interior - wall-papers,
pictures, furniture, and oftentimes
The dull expressionless
face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her
shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey
hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to
make the road dusty all day long.
Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no
longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village,
but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary
Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her
flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present
degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the
"Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that
you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else.
The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time,
and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now
filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting
chapel.
From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by
those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for
we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis.
It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide
over several square miles of country, but just where the
church stands it is shady and pleasant.
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