THREE:It was all very wonderful and sweet to Robert, and when at last he crept under the sheets in the apple-smelling garret he would dream of him and Bessie wandering in the Peasmarsh fieldsor sometimes in those starry meadows where the hedges shone and twinkled with the fruit of constellations, and Charles drove his waggon along a golden road, and sheep ate from a flickering trough under a great tree of lamps.The crest of Boarzell was marked by a group of firs, very gaunt and wind-bitten, rising out of a mass of gorse, as the plumes of some savage chief might nod mangily above his fillet. When the gorse was in bloom,[Pg 2] one caught the flare of it from the Kentish hills, or away westward from Brightling and Dallington. This day in the October of 1835, the flowerets were either nipped or scattered, or hidden by the cloths the gipsies had spread to dry on the bushes.