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, toward 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 splendor 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 farm-houses, with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone
as the crags behind them, and the ravines in which the shrunken brooks
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 labor and of will, and to develop that 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 flowerbeds, 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 new bow window,
modest enough in dimensions and make, had been thrown out on to
another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its suggestion of a distant
sophisticated order of things disturbed the homely impression left
by the untouched ivy-grown walls, the unpretending porch, and wide
slate-window sills of the front. And evidently the line of sheds
standing level with the dwelling-house no longer sheltered the animals,
the carts, or the tools which make the small capital of a Westmoreland