t was a hilly road, and I begged the lad who drove
us not to press the horse; so we were nearly an hour, at our slow rate
of going, before we drew up at the gate of Appletreewick.

24th February to 2d March.--We have now been here long enough to know
something of the place and the people. First, as to the place: Where
the farmhouse now is, there was once a famous priory. The tower is still
standing, and the great room where the monks ate and drank--used at
present as a granary. The house itself seems to have been tacked on to
the ruins anyhow. No two rooms in it are on the same level. The children
do nothing but tumble about the passages, because there always happens
to be a step up or down, just at the darkest part of every one of them.
As for staircases, there seems to me to be one for each bedroom. I do
nothing but lose my way--and the farmer says, drolling, that he must
have sign-posts put up for me in every corner of the house from top to
bottom. On the ground-floor, besides the usual domestic offices, we have
the best parlor--a dark, airless, expensively furnished solitude, never
invaded by anybody; the kitchen, and a kind of hall, with a fireplace as
big as the drawing-room at our town lodgings. Here we live and take our
meals; here the children can racket about to their hearts' content; here
the dogs come lumbering in, whenever they can get loose; here wages are
paid, visitors are received, bacon is cured, cheese is tasted, pipes
are smoked, and naps are taken every evening by the male members of the
family. Never was such a comfortable, friendly dwelling-place devised as
this hall; I feel already as if half my life had been passed in it.

Out-of-doors, looking beyond the flower-garden, lawn, back yards,
pigeon-houses, and kitchen-gardens, we are surrounded by a network of
smooth grazing-fields, each shut off from the other by its neat hedgerow
and its sturdy gate. Beyond the fields the hills seem to flow away
gently from us into the far blue distance, till they are lost in the
bright softness of the sky. At one point, which we can see from our
bedroom windows, they dip suddenly into the plain, and show, over
the rich marshy flat, a strip of distant sea--a strip sometimes
blue, sometimes gray; sometimes, when the sun sets, a streak of fire;
sometimes, on showery days, a flash of silver light.

The inhabitants of the farmhouse have one great and rare merit--they are
people whom you can make friends with at once.