ditches and fences into squares and triangles and oblongs and rectangles, all as emerald-hued as faery rings. The human habitations were so scattered, that it looked as though some careless genii had dropped them by chance when flying overhead. Far away glittered the broad stream of the Thames, with ships and steamers and boats and barges moving, outward and inward bound, on its placid surface. The rigid line of the railway shot straightly through villages and trees and occasional cuttings, across the verdant expanse, with here and there a knot representing a station. Smoke curled from the tall chimneys of the dynamite factories near the river, and silvery puffs of steam showed that a train was on its way to Tilbury. All was fresh, restful, beautiful, and so intensely green as to be suggestive of early Spring buddings.

"When I took command of this here farm, ten years back," observed Captain Huxham, drawing in a deep breath of moist air, "it were water-logged like a derelict, es y' might say. Cast yer weather-eye over it now, Mr. Pence, an' wot's yer look-out: a gardin of Edin, smilin' with grain."

"Yet it's a derelict still," remarked the preacher, struggling to his feet and holding on by the chimney; "let me examine your farm of Bleacres."

Bleacres—a corruption of bleakacres—consisted of only twenty acres not at all bleak, but a mere slice out of the wide domains formerly owned by the aristocratic family dispossessed by Huxham. It extended all round the ancient manor-house, which stood exactly in the centre, and every foot of it was sown with corn. On every side waved the greenish-bluish crop, now almost breast high. It rolled right up to the walls of the house, so that this was drowned, so to speak, in the ocean of grain. The various fields were divided and sub-divided by water-ways wide and narrow, which drained the land, and these gave the place quite a Dutch look, as fancy might picture them as canals. But the corn grew everywhere so thick and high, in contrast to the barren marshes, that the farm looked almost aggressively cultivated. Bleacres was widely known as "The Solitary Farm," for there was not another like it for many miles, though why it should have been left to a retired sailor to cultivate the soil it is hard to say. But Huxham for many years had sown corn on his twenty acres, so that the mansion for the most part of the year was quite shut off from the world. Only a narrow path was left, which meandered from the front door and across various water-ways to Marshely village, one mile distant. In no other way save by this path could the mansion be approached. And as guardian of the place a 

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