ands of white edging the
windows into relief against the gray stone of the main fabric, the gray
roof overhanging it, and the group of sycamores and Scotch firs which
protected it from the cold east and north. The western light struck full
on a copper beech, which made a welcome patch of warm colour in front of
a long gray line of outhouses standing level with the house, and touched
the heckberry blossom which marked the upward course of the little lane
connecting the old farm with the road; above it rose the green fell,
broken here and there by jutting crags, and below it the ground sank
rapidly through a piece of young hazel plantation, at this present
moment a sheet of bluebells, towards the level of the river. There was a
dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the
North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is elsewhere,
but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendour and
superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green valleys
there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of
winter seems to be still lingering about these wind-swept fells, about
the farmhouses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as
the crags behind them, and the ravines, in which the shrunken becks
trickle musically down through the _debris_ of innumerable Decembers.
The country is blithe, but soberly blithe. Nature shows herself
delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing or intoxicating about
her. Man is still well able to defend himself against her, to live his
own independent life of labour and of will, and to develop the tenacity
of hidden feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose, which is so
often wiled out of him by the spells of the South.

The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from that of the
few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clustered beside the
river between it and the rocky end of the valley. But as one came
nearer, certain signs of difference became visible. The garden, instead
of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, lavender bushes, monthly
roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and pampas grass, with which the
farmers' wives of Long Whindale loved to fill their little front
enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted with neat flower-beds,
full at the moment we are writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and
purple anemones, wallflowers, and pansies. At the side of the house a