Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/357

 in a sad state of disrepair, its last "restoration" bearing the date of 1745, but, as it was all there was to be had, she risked taking it on trial. Gradually improving and restoring it, she has now brought it back to look something like it must have been in the fifteenth century, when it was quite an important house, requiring a "watch-tower," wherein a watchman was set to guard the property, and which still stands in the garden, having been transformed into a cozy summer "study" for the novelist. Every month sees some new addition to the charming oak-panelled rooms, which are essentially home-like, and Miss Corelli's love of flowers, which amounts to a passion, shows itself in the mass of blossom which in winter, equally as in the summer, adorns her "winter-garden," leading out from the drawing-room.

She is very fond of the home she has made, and fond of the town in which it stands, and her reason for living in Stratford arises simply out of the old cherished sentiment of her childhood's days when she was taught to consider the little town as the real "Heart of England," where the greatest of poets had birth, and where her idolized stepfather had promised to "pass many happy days with her." She takes the keenest interest in all the joys and sorrows of Stratford's townspeople, and grudges