Under the Mendips

It was a fair morning of early summer, when the low beams of the eastern sun, threw flickering shadows across the lawn, which lay before Fair Acres Manor, nestling under the shelter of the Mendip Hills, somewhere between Wells and Cheddar. The dewy lawn before Fair Acres, with its beautiful mosaic of white and gold, fringed with circles of deepest crimson here and there, would not suit the taste of the conventional gardener of these days; nor would the low, irregular building which overlooked it, be considered an attractive or fitting residence, for the sons and daughters of the small country squire in the ninth decade of the century.