Read it through once

“Your delightful letter, my dear Sir William,” wrote Miss Mitford shortly afterwards, “arrived at the very moment when kindness was most needed and most welcome—just as we were leaving our dear old home to come to this new one. Without being in general very violently addicted to sentimentality, I was, as you may imagine, a little grieved to leave the spot where I had passed so many happy years. The trees, and fields, and sunny hedgerows, however little distinguished by picturesque beauty, were to me as old friends. Women have more of this natural feeling than the stronger sex; they are creatures of home and habit, and ill brook transplanting. We, however, are not quite transplanted yet—rather, as the gardeners say, ‘laid by the heels.’ We have only moved to a little village street, situate on the turnpike road, between Basingstoke and the illustrious and quarrelsome borough [Reading]. Our residence is a cottage—no, not a cottage—it does not deserve the name—a messuage or tenement, such as a little farmer who had made twelve or fourteen hundred pounds might retire to when he left off business to live on his means. It consists of a series of closets, the largest of which may be about eight feet square, which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries; some of them minus a corner, which has been unnaturally filched for a chimney; others deficient in half a side, which has been truncated by the shelving roof. Behind is a garden about the size of a good drawing-room, with an arbour which is a complete sentry-box of privet. On one side a public-house, on the other a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler’s stall.