First Sentence

"A LARGE, old fashioned, rambling white house with red-tiled roof, standing high up on the side of a steep green hill; a background of dark fir-trees crowning that hill, belts of plantation running down to a split oak fence; a long broad strip of common-land, the turf smooth and close as velvet; a narrow sandy country road-made up a landscape on which I gazed day after day, and year after year, from the windows of our cottage, till it became photographed on my brain, a very part and parcel of my memory."