It was as still as a church on a week-day: the pattering rain on the forest leaves was the only sound audible in its vicinage. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, c1850.
In the few years that she had lived here, a stranger herself, in some sort – not accustomed, as was her husband, to a lifelong vicinage to the pygmy burial-ground – she had developed no receptivity to that uncanny idea of a race of dwarfs.