“The Manor House, sir,” he said, pointing with his whip. “The estate begins here, sir.”
The “estate” was bordered by a high iron fence, stretching as far as we could see. Beside that fence we rode for some distance. Then another turn in the road and we entered the street of a little village, a village of picturesque little houses, brick or stone always—not a frame house among them. Many of the roofs were thatched. Flowers and climbing vines and little gardens everywhere. The village looked as if it had been there, just as it was, for centuries.
“This is Mayberry, sir,” said our driver. “That is the rectory, next the church.”
We could see the church tower and the roof, but the rectory was not yet visible to our eyes. We turned in between two of the houses, larger and more pretentious than the rest. The driver alighted and opened a big wooden gate. Before us was a driveway, shaded by great elms and bordered by rose hedges. At the end of the driveway was an old-fashioned, comfortable looking, brick house. Vines hid the most of the bricks. Flower beds covered its foundations. A gray-haired old gentleman stood in the doorway.
This was the rectory we had come to see and the gray-haired gentleman was the Reverend Mr. Cole, the rector.
“My soul!” whispered Hephzy, looking aghast at the spacious grounds, “we can never hire THIS. This is too expensive and grand for us, Hosy. Look at the grass to cut and the flowers to attend to, and the house to run. No wonder the servants have 'quarters.' My soul and body! I thought a rector was a kind of minister, and a rectory was a sort of parsonage, but I guess I'm off my course, as Father used to say. Either that or ministers' wages are higher than they are in Bayport. No, this place isn't for you and me, Hosy.”
But it was. Before we left that rectory in the afternoon I had agreed to lease it until the middle of September, servants—there were five of them, groom and gardener included—horse and trap, tennis court, vegetable garden, fruit, flowers and all. It developed that the terms, which I had considered rather too high for my purse, included the servants' wages, vegetables from the garden, strawberries and other “small fruit”—everything. Even food for the horse was included in that all-embracing rent.
As Hephzy said, everything considered, the rent of Mayberry Rectory was lower than that of a fair-sized summer cottage at Bayport.
The Reverend Mr. Cole was a delightful gentleman. His wife was equally kind and agreeable. I think they were, at first, rather unpleasantly surprised to find that their prospective tenants were from the “States”; but Hephzy and I managed to behave as unlike savages as we could, and the Cole manner grew less and less reserved. Mr. Cole and his wife were planning to spend a long vacation in Switzerland and his “living,” or parish, was to be left in charge of his two curates. There was a son at Oxford who was to join them on their vacation.
Mr. Cole and I walked about the grounds and visited the church, the yard of which, with its weather-beaten gravestones and fine old trees, adjoined the rectory on the western side, behind the tall hedge.