I lately had a experience (said the gentleman who is answerable for the truth of this story).  It was that of going over a house with whose outside aspect I had long been familiar—a house, that is, which by reason of age and was to be pulled down during the following week.  Some of the , brown and rotten as the gills of old mushrooms, had, indeed, been removed before I walked over the building.  Seeing that it was only a very small house—which is usually called a ‘cottage-residence’—situated in a remote hamlet, and that it was not more than a hundred years old, if so much, I was led to think in my progress through the hollow rooms, with their cracked walls and sloping floors, what an exceptional number of family incidents had taken place therein—to reckon only those which had come to my own knowledge.  And no doubt there were many more of which I had never heard.  
It stood at the top of a garden stretching down to the lane or street that ran through a hermit-group of in Mellstock parish.  From a green gate at the lower entrance, over which the thorn hedge had been shaped to an............