Excerpt from Marcella, Vol. 1 IN the summer Of 1892 We settled in the Hertfordshire house, which has been, Since then, for seventeen years our principal home. All my books Since David Grieve have been written there, except for occasional flights abroad, when a more complete isolation than even Stocks can give seemed the only medicine for a halting story. We left Haslemere in the Spring Of that year mainly because the growth Of the population all round us, and the rise of new houses wherever land could be had for building, seemed to foreshadow a country exist ence almost as full Of social happenings and Obliga tions as London itself. It became clear, also, that amid the villadom Of Surrey, enchantingly beautiful as the Surrey commons and woods still are, it was hardly possible to come very close to the traditional life of field and farm, and I had begun to feel a great wish to come close to it. Till then a townswoman, liv ing in Oxford or London, and camping for the summer amid the wildness Of the commons between Milford and Peper Harow, I had little practical knowledge Of the familiar routine, the immemorial forces and tradi tions which govern rural England. Yet at Hampden in '89, among the remote woods and lanes Of the Chilterns, I had felt strongly the drawing Of that life of the earth and its labours. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.