Tales of My Time, Vol. 1 (of 3) by William Pitt Scargill

At not more than a stone’s throw from a neat market town, in a certain shire of England, lived Francis Hartland, Esq. in a well-built square house, which was separated from the King’s high road, by a lawn of twenty acres. Round this lawn a double row of handsome elms lined a ring fence, and formed the outer boundary, in that part next the house, of a bank covered with all sorts of shrubs, which sloped in a gradually inclined plane, from the shining laurel to the dwarf cistus, and meta broad belt of gravel, hard and smooth as marble, through which no upstart weed ever dared to force its way.