My third pilgrimage was to a very different
sort of place, Harrington. I got to that sombre
Berkshire market-town, by a little branch railway
from Brindleton. We ran down from the
open country into a valley stretching downward
to the Thames. The town consisted of four
streets, of queer gable-ended pent-housed buildings,
debouching in a market-place, the chief
feature of which was the bow-window of a large
inn. Beyond this the street ran straight to a
huge pile of stone surrounded by acres of dim
churchyard, thick set with head-stones.

The house was shown me by the parish clerk,
for it belonged to the clergyman. The clerk
was a small tradesman, stout, rubicund and
smoothly respectable, deferential, and with a
second-hand clerical manner, which was not
exactly hypocritical, but looked rather like it.
Again I saw the shuttered windows and dusty
walls of a house to let; again the key opened a
jarring and echoing tenement.  A little quicker,
and we should have come on revelling fairies or
a sleeping Brownie. As it was, we saw nothing.
It is hard to steal a march on fairies. The
house had been a doctor's. There was not much
to say against it at forty-five pounds a year.
Good rooms—up and down, plenty of store-rooms,
large cellar, great outhouses, disused
coach-house, mouldy doors, detached wash-house;
altogether, the place where a murder
must have been, or certainly would be, committed;
large dark yards, with one dim latticed-window
looking on a paved court, every stone
in it cracked across.The garden, a little damp
enclosure, with gouty-jointed trees hung with
cobwebs, was across the road, and open to
every one who passed.

"That churchyard makes a very bad look-out,
clerk," said I. "I should mope to death here."

"Sir, you know there's no burials now in the
part opposite your windows."

"My windows? No. It won't do," I said,
emphatically, to the bland clerk; "very dull, and
no view. My compliments to Mr. Harker, say
it's very nice, but doesn't quite suit me."

"Try Surrey, dear Ned," said Lizzie, on my
return, as she stuck a lily of the valley in my
button-hole, so constituting me her delighted
and daring knight-errant for the day. "How
cruel it is of ma making my poor Ned take all
this trouble!"

"Stuff and nonsense," said Mrs. Masterman.
"What can be more important, my dear, than
the choice of a house? It would not be too
much if Edward spent six weeks looking for a
desirable residence. I am not going to let you
inexperienced young creatures put up with any
avoidable inconveniences. Edward, try Surrey.
What do you say to Crayton or Northgate?"

To Northgate I went. Curious old town,
with an up and down street, and a fine old
Elizabethan palace at one end, out of whose
gateway one almost expected to see old Doctor
Donne emerge, or excellent Mr. Evelyn. The
High-street seemed to end in a green field at
one end, and a rifle drill-shed at the other. A
river ran across Northgate, fine wooded hills
girded it in. One old church lay broadside on
to the quaint High-street, and another gloomed
down on it from a side opening, like a fortress
built to command it in times when the citizens
were factious and turbulent. Facing this there
was an inn with plate-glass windows and an air
of snug comfort that made the beef and ale most
palatable.

The house-agent was a little chirpy red-faced
man with a great deal of white hair, and an
after-dinner manner of such intense chuckling
enjoyment at his own importance and success,
that he seemed longing every moment to burst
into a laugh. His wife, a pleasant neatly-dressed
old lady, with flying lilac ribbons,
stood at the office door, in equal good nature,
and with equal importance and bustle.

"Not a house to be had in Northgate; great
demand; people coming from Crayton and
snapping up everything; ain't they, Mrs. Dawkins?"

"To be sure they are, Mr. Dawkins."

"And land dear, and not to be had. Is it,
Mrs. Dawkins?"

"Not a rod, Mr. Dawkins."

"But I'll see. Why, isn't there that house
on the Nortyton-road? Old lady died only on
Monday last, and next day they sent here to tell
me to put the house up to let. Didn't they,
Mrs. Dawkins?"

"To be sure they did, Mr. Dawkins."

Then the jolly old couple looked at each
other, and laughed and chirped at the very
thought of an old lady dying on Monday, and
they having to put "To Let" up in the window
the day after. I did not see the joke.

The house was a little trim building, one of a
row of six, with a little garden in front, and a
low wall of pierced stone-work. The front
windows commanded a view—pleasant? Well,
not so varied as it might have been—a huge
square flat field planted with cow-cabbages.
The back windows stared on a small parallelogram
of garden, now a heap of rubbish. There
was a little mean front room, and there was a
handsome but dull drawing-room, and five or
six little binns of bedrooms, like those you find
at sea-side lodging-houses. I left dissatisfied.

I had only Crayton to visit. When a man
goes house-hunting he is apt to become
superstitious,and to look around him for auguries and
omens of success or failure. He tries to
discover whether the place he is visiting is or is not
to be the place which Providence has chosen for
his next halting-place in life's march. He tries
to get the place into focus, and to consider
whether such an outlook, such a road at the back,
such neighbours, such an aspect, are supportable
or insupportable. He looks at the gate, to see
if it be the sort of gate at which he would like to
make his exits and his entrances. He poses
himself in the dining-room, behind an imaginary
rank and file of decanters, and speculates if he
could be witty or comfortable there—or both—
or either—or neither? I had tried those mental
pictures at Northgate, and they had come out
damaged photographs. I had still to try them
at Crayton.