CHAPTER II.
MATTHEW HAYGARTH'S RESTING-PLACE.
I found the house at Dewsdale without difficulty.

It is a stiff, square, red-brick dwelling-place, with long narrow windows, a high narrow door, and carved canopy; a house which savours of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_; a house in which the short-faced gentleman might have spent his summer holidays after Sir Roger's death.

It stands behind a high iron gate, surmounted by a handsome coat of arms; and before it there lies a pleasant patch of greensward, with a pond and a colony of cackling geese, which craned their necks and screamed at me as I passed them.
The place is the simplest and smallest of rural villages.

There is a public-house--the Seven Stars; a sprinkling of humble cottages; a general shop, which is at once a shoemaker's, a grocer's, a linen draper's, a stationer's, and a post office.

These habitations, a gray old church with a square tower, half hidden by the sombre foliage of yews and cedars, and the house once inhabited by the Haygarths, comprise the whole of the village.