The Solitary Farm

e the village of Marshely, not so very far away, with red-roofed houses gathered closely round the grey, square tower of the church; he could even see the tin roof of his own humble Bethel gleaming like silver in the sunlight. And here and there, dotted indiscriminately, were lonely houses, single huts, clumps of trees, and on the higher ground rising inland, more villages similar to Marshely. The flat and perilously green lands were divided by hedges and ditches and fences into squares and triangles and oblongs and rectangles, all as emerald-hued as faery rings. The human habitations were so scattered, that it looked as though some careless genii had dropped them by chance when flying overhead. Far away glittered the broad stream of the Thames, with ships and steamers and boats and barges moving, outward and inward bound, on its placid surface. The rigid line of the railway shot straightly through villages and trees and occasional cuttings, across the verdant expanse, with here and there a knot representing