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simple baldness, and his lacerated cloth shoes filled the owners of
numerous undesirable properties with vain hopes. And he advertised in
several daily papers and Nature for a responsible couple (married),
punctual, active, and used to poultry, to take entire charge of an
Experimental Farm of three acres.
He found the place he seemed in need of at Hickleybrow, near Urshot, in
Kent. It was a little queer isolated place, in a dell surrounded by old
pine woods that were black and forbidding at night. A humped shoulder of
down cut it off from the sunset, and a gaunt well with a shattered
penthouse dwarfed the dwelling. The little house was creeperless,
several windows were broken, and the cart shed had a black shadow at
midday. It was a mile and a half from the end house of the village, and
its loneliness was very doubtfully relieved by an ambiguous family of
echoes.
The place impressed Bensington as being eminently adapted to the
requirements of scientific research. He walked over the premises
sketching out coops and runs with a sweeping arm, and he found the
kitchen capable of accommodating a series of incubators and foster
mothers with the very minimum of alteration. He took the place there and
then; on his way back to London he stopped at Dunton Green and closed
with an eligible couple that had answered his advertisements, and that
same evening he succeeded in isolating a sufficient quantity of
Herakleophorbia I. to more than justify these engagements.
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