The Pillars of the House, V1 by Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 1823-1901

'And how would you get Cherry there, or Mamma! Or Baby!--No, no, if you are too genteel for the van, you may walk.'

CHAPTER II

THE PICNIC

'There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid A damask napkin, wrought with horse and hound; Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home, And, half-cut down, a pasty costly made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied; last, with these A flask of cider from his father's vats, Prime which I knew;--and so we sat and ate.' TENNYSON.

No. 8 St. Oswald's Buildings was a roomy house, which owed its cheapness to its situation, this being neither in the genteel nor the busy part of Bexley. It was tall and red, and possessed a good many rooms, and it looked out into a narrow street, the opposite side of which consisted of the long wall of a brewery, which was joined farther on to that of the stable-yard of the Fortinbras Arms, the principal hotel, which had been much frequented in old posting days, and therefore had offices on a large scale. Only their side, however, was presented to St. Oswald's Buildings, the front, with its arched 'porte cochere,' being in the High Street, as it was still called, though it was a good deal outshone by the newer part of the town.

The next-door neighbours of No. 8 were on the one hand a carpenter's yard, the view of which was charming to the children, and the noises not too obnoxious to their parents, and on the other the rectory garden, which separated them from the churchyard, now of course disused. It had no entrance towards their lane, and to reach the church, it was necessary to turn the corner of the wall, and go in through the south porch, which opened close upon the High Street.

In this old street lay the two buildings that chiefly concerned the young Underwoods, i.e. the two schools. That for boys was an old foundation, which had fallen into decay, and had been reformed and revivified in nineteenth-century fashion, to suit the requirements of the town. The place, though in the south of England, had become noted as a pottery, owing partly to the possession of large fields of a peculiar clay, which was so bad for vegetable growth as to proclaim its destiny to become pots and pans, partly to its convenient neighbourhood to the rising seaport of Dearport, which was only an hour from it by railway. The old St. Oswald's school had been moulded under the influence of newcomers, who had upset the rules of the founder, and arranged the terms on the broadest principles of liberality, bringing, instead of the drowsy old clerical master, a very brisk and lively young layman, who had a knack of conveying instruction of multifarious kinds such as had never occurred to his predecessor.