We spent a whole summer and autumn in travelling from end to end of the British islands, and afterwards passed a winter in London.

Then we thought it high time to fix our residence.

My heart yearned towards my native county of -- --shire; and it is in -- --shire I now live; it is in the library of my own home I am now writing.

That home lies amid a sequestered and rather hilly region, thirty miles removed from X----; a region whose verdure the smoke of mills has not yet sullied, whose waters still run pure, whose swells of moorland preserve in some ferny glens that lie between them the very primal wildness of nature, her moss, her bracken, her blue-bells, her scents of reed and heather, her free and fresh breezes.
My house is a picturesque and not too spacious dwelling, with low and long windows, a trellised and leaf-veiled porch over the front door, just now, on this summer evening, looking like an arch of roses and ivy.
The garden is chiefly laid out in lawn, formed of the sod of the hills, with herbage short and soft as moss, full of its own peculiar flowers, tiny and starlike, imbedded in the minute embroidery of their fine foliage.

At the bottom of the sloping garden there is a wicket, which opens upon a lane as green as the lawn, very long, shady, and little frequented; on the turf of this lane generally appear the first daisies of spring--whence its name--Daisy Lane; serving also as a distinction to the house.
It terminates (the lane I mean) in a valley full of wood; which wood--chiefly oak and beech--spreads shadowy about the vicinage of a very old mansion, one of the Elizabethan structures, much larger, as well as more antique than Daisy Lane, the property and residence of an individual familiar both to me and to the reader.