farmer. The windows in them were new, the doors fresh painted and
closely shut; curtains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves
in what had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a
narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single footmark.
No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly was, had been but
lately, or comparatively lately, transformed to new and softer uses;
that rough patriarchal life of which it had once been a symbol and
centre no longer bustled and clattered through it. It had become the
shelter of new ideals, the home of another and a milder race than once
possessed it.

In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on this
particular evening, the sense of a changing social order and a vanishing
past produced by the slight but significant modifications it had
undergone, would have been greatly quickened by certain sounds which
were streaming out on to the evening air from one of the divisions of
that long one-storied addition to the main dwelling we have already
described. Some indefatigable musician inside was practising the violin
with surprising energy and vigor, and within the little garden the
distant murmur of the river and the gentle breathing of the West wind
round the fell were entirely conquered and banished by these triumphant
shakes and turns, or by the flourishes and the broad _cantabile_
passages of one of Spohr's Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower
and lower toward the Shanmoor hills, the hidden artist had it all his,
or her, own way; the valley and its green spaces seemed to be possessed
by this stream of eddying sound, and no other sign of life broke the
gray quiet of the house. But at last, just as the golden ball touched
the summit of the craggy fell, which makes the western boundary of the
dale at its higher end, the house-door opened, and a young girl, shawled
and holding some soft burden in her arms, appeared on the threshold,
and stood there for a moment, as though trying the quality of the air
outside. Her pause of inspection seemed to satisfy her, for she moved
forward, leaving the door open behind her, and, stepping across the
lawn, settled herself in a wicker chair under an apple-tree, which had
only just shed its blossoms on the turf below. She had hardly done so
when one of the distant doors opening on the gravel path flew open,
and another maiden, a slim creature garbed in aesthetic blue, a mass of
reddish br