Novels and Tales Author:Charles Dickens Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TWO COLLEGE FRIENDS. CHAPTER I. In the year seventeen hundred and seventy three, two young men took possession of the only habitable rooms of the old tumbl... more »e-down rectory-house of Combe- "Warleigh, in one of the wildest parts of one of the western counties, then chiefly notable for miles upon miles of totally uncultivated moor and hill. The rooms were not many; consisting only of two wretched little bed-chambers and a parlour of diminutive size. A small building which leaned against the outer wall served as a kitchen to the establishment; and the cook, an old woman of sixty years of age, retired every night to a cottage about a quarter of a mile from the parsonage, where she had occupied a garret for many years. The house had originally been built of lath and plaster, and in some places revealed the skeleton walls where the weather had peeled off the outer coating, and given the building an appearance of ruin and desolation which comported with the bleakness of the surrounding scenery. With the exception of the already-named cottage and a small collection of huts around the deserted mansion of the landlord of the estate, there were no houses in the parish. How it had ever come to the honour of possessing a church and rectory no one could discover; for there were no records or traditions of its ever having been more wealthy or populous than it then was; — but dt was in fact only nominally a parish, for no clergyman had been resident for a hundred years; the living was held by the fortunate possessor of a vicarage about fifteen miles to the north, and with the tithes of the united cures made up a stately income of nearly ninety pounds a-year. JSTo wonder there were no repairs on the rectory — nor frequent visits to his parishioners. It was only on the first Sunday of each mo...« less