green recesses, where the few
scattered trees were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at
their feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of March and
April still lingered, as though they found it impossible to believe that
their rough brother, the east wind, had at last deserted them. The
narrow road, which was the only link between the farmhouses sheltered by
the crags at the head of the valley and those far-away regions of town
and civilisation suggested by the smoke wreaths of Whinborough on the
southern horizon, was lined with masses of the white heckberry or
bird-cherry, and ran, an arrowy line of white, through the greenness of
the sloping pastures. The sides of some of the little becks running down
into the main river and many of the plantations round the farms were gay
with the same tree, so that the farmhouses, gray-roofed and gray-walled,
standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here and there to have been
robbed of all their natural austerity of aspect, and to be masquerading
in a dainty garb of white and green imposed upon them by the caprice of
the spring.

During the greater part of its course the valley of Long Whindale is
tame and featureless. The hills at the lower part are low and rounded,
and the sheep and cattle pasture over slopes unbroken either by wood or
rock. The fields are bare and close shaven by the flocks which feed on
them; the walls run either perpendicularly in many places up the fells
or horizontally along them, so that, save for the wooded course of the
tumbling river and the bush-grown hedges of the road, the whole valley
looks like a green map divided by regular lines of grayish black. But as
the walker penetrates farther, beyond a certain bend which the stream
makes half way from the head of the dale, the hills grow steeper, the
breadth between them contracts, the enclosure lines are broken and
deflected by rocks and patches of plantation, and the few farms stand
more boldly and conspicuously forward, each on its spur of land,
looking up to or away from the great masses of frowning crag which close
in the head of the valley, and which from the moment they come into
sight give it dignity and a wild beauty.

On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to descend
before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whindale from Shanmoor,
was still lingering on this May afternoon we are describing, bringing
out the whitewashed porch and the broad b