Page:Austen - Mansfield Park, vol. II, 1814.djvu/153

 of a retired little village between gently rising hills; a small stream before me to be forded, a church standing on a sort of knoll to my right—which church was strikingly large and handsome for the place, and not a gentleman or half a gentleman's house to be seen excepting one—to be presumed the Parsonage, within a stone's throw of the said knoll and church. I found myself in short in Thornton Lacey."

"It sounds like it," said Edmund; "but which way did you turn after passing Sewell's farm?"

"I answer no such irrelevant and insidious questions; though were I to answer all that you could put in the course of an hour, you would never be able to prove that it was not Thornton Lacey—for such it certainly was."

"You inquired then?"

"No, I never inquire. But I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it." VOL. II.