e blaze lingered, enthroned; the far winding of the valley,
hemmed in also by blue and craggy fells, was pierced by rays of
sunset; on the broad side of the pikes the stream of Dungeon Ghyll
shone full-fed and white; the sheep, with their new-born lambs beside
them, studded the green pastures of the valley; and sounds of water
came from the fell-sides. Everywhere lines of broad and flowing
harmony, moulded by some subtle union of rock and climate and
immemorial age into a mountain beauty which is the peculiar possession
of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Neither awful, nor yet trivial;
neither too soft for dignity, nor too rugged for delight.
The Westmoreland hills are the remains of an infinitely older
world--giants decayed, but of a great race and ancestry; they have
the finish, the delicate or noble loveliness--one might almost say the
_manner_--that comes of long and gentle companionship with those
chief forces that make for natural beauty, with air and water, with
temperate suns and too abundant rains. Beside them the Alps are
inhuman; the Apennines mere forest-grown heaps--mountains in the
making; while all that Scotland gains from the easy enveloping glory
of its heather, Westmoreland, which is almost heatherless, must owe
to an infinitude of fine strokes, tints, curves, and groupings, to
touches of magic and to lines of grace, yet never losing the wild
energy of precipice and rock that belongs of right to a mountain
world.

To-day Langdale was in spring. The withered fern was still red on the
sides of the pikes; there was not a leaf on the oaks, still less on
the ashes; but the larches were green in various plantations, and the
sycamores were bursting. Half a mile eastward the woods were all in
soft bloom, carpeted with windflowers and bluebells. Here, but for the
larches, and the few sycamores and yews that guard each lonely farm,
all was naked fell and pasture. The harsh spring wind came rioting up
the valley, to fling itself on the broad sides of the pikes; the lambs
made a sad bleating; the water murmured in the ghyll beyond the house;
the very sunshine was clear and cold.

Calculations quick and anxious passed through the young wife's brain.
Debts here, and debts there; the scanty list of small commissions
ahead, which she knew by heart; the uncertainty of the year before
them; clothes urgently wanted for the child, for John, for herself.
She drew a long and harassed breath.

Phoebe Fenwick was a tall, sle